Configuring AWS Web Application Firewall

In a previous blog, we discussed Site Delivery with AWS CloudFront CDN, one aspect in that blog was not covered and that was WAF (Web Application Firewall).
What is Web Application Firewall?

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives you control over which traffic to allow or block to your web applications by defining customizable web security rules.

[Keep reading] “Configuring AWS Web Application Firewall”

Azure API Management Step by Step – Use Cases

jorge-fotoUse Cases

On this second post about Azure API management, let’s discuss about use cases. Why “Use Cases”?                  

Use cases helps to manage complexity, since it focuses on one specific usage aspect at the time. I am grouping and versioning use cases to facilitate your learning process and helping to keep track with future changes. You are welcome to use these diagrams to demonstrate Azure API management features.

API On-boarding is a key aspect of API governance and first thing to be discussed. [Keep reading] “Azure API Management Step by Step – Use Cases”

Enterprise Cloud Take Up Accelerating Rapidly According to New Study By McKinsey

A pair of studies published a few days ago by global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company entitled IT as a service: From build to consume show enterprise adoption of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services accelerating increasingly rapidly over the next two years into 2018.
Of the two, one examined the on-going migrations of 50 global businesses. The other saw a large number of CIOs, from small businesses up to Fortune 100 companies, interviewed on the progress of their transitions and the results speak for themselves.… [Keep reading] “Enterprise Cloud Take Up Accelerating Rapidly According to New Study By McKinsey”

Azure Functions or WebJobs? Where to run my background processes on Azure?

functionsvswebjobs-icon

Introduction

Azure WebJobs have been a quite popular way of running background processes on Azure. They have been around since early 2014. When they were released, they were a true PaaS alternative to Cloud Services Worker Roles bringing many benefits like the WebJobs SDK, easy configuration of scalability and availability, a dashboard, and more recently all the advantages of Azure Resource Manager and a very flexible continuous delivery model. My colleague Namit previously compared WebJobs to Worker Roles.[Keep reading] “Azure Functions or WebJobs? Where to run my background processes on Azure?”

Azure API Management Step by Step

jorge-fotoIntroduction

As a speaker and cloud consultant, I have learned and received a lot of feedback about Azure API management platform from customers and community members. I will share some of my learnings in this series of blog posts. Let’s get started!

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APIs – Application programming interfaces are everywhere! They are already part of many companies’ strategies. But how could we consolidate internal and external APIs? How could you productize and monetize them for your company?… [Keep reading] “Azure API Management Step by Step”

Connecting Azure Mobile Apps and Web Apps to existing on-premises infrastructure using Azure Hybrid Connections

This article describes a very easy and secure way of connecting your Azure Mobile Apps and Azure Web Apps to your existing on-premises infrastructure. The option is called Hybrid Connections and is a feature of Azure BizTalk Services. The feature does not require any VPN configuration or opening Inbound ports on the Firewall. After completion of a few simple configuration steps in the Azure Portal and installation of so-called Hybrid Connection Manager(HCM) program on your on-premises servers, you are ready to consume your on-premises services from your Cloud App right away.… [Keep reading] “Connecting Azure Mobile Apps and Web Apps to existing on-premises infrastructure using Azure Hybrid Connections”

Encryption In The Cloud

Is it safe? 

Three simple yet chilling words immortalized by the 1976 movie Marathon Man staring Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, in which Olivier tries to discover by very unpleasant means whether the location of his stolen diamonds has been exposed.

Well had Sir Lawrence encrypted that information, there would have been no need for him to worry because he would have known that short of using a weak cypher or vulnerable algorithm or password, encrypted data has a very strong chance of remaining secret no matter what.… [Keep reading] “Encryption In The Cloud”

Create a Cloud Strategy For Your Business

Let’s be clear, today’s cloud as a vehicle for robust and flexible enterprise grade IT is here and it’s here to stay. Figures published by IDG Research’s 2015 Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey predict that in 2016 25% of total enterprise IT budgets will be allocated to cloud computing.

They also reported that the average cloud spend for all the enterprises surveyed would reach 2.87M in the following year and that 72% of enterprises have at least one application running in the cloud already, compared to 57% in 2012.… [Keep reading] “Create a Cloud Strategy For Your Business”

Azure Deployment Models And How To Migrate From ASM to ARM

This is a post about the two deployment models currently available in Azure, Service Management (ASM) and Resource Manager (ARM). And how to migrate from one to the other if necessary.

About the Azure Service Management deployment model

The ASM model, also known as version 1 and Classic mode, started out as a web interface and a backend API for the PaaS services Azure opened with at launch.

Features

  1. ASM deployments are based on an XML schema.
[Keep reading] “Azure Deployment Models And How To Migrate From ASM to ARM”

Azure reference architecture

tl;dr

  • What is a reference architecture
    • My definition of a reference architecture
  • I stop using the word architecture after the first 3 paragraphs – word overkill
  • What are some important topics to cover in said document
  • Is it easy to write? NO
  • Final words – don’t jump into Azure without a reference architecture

I’m not going to lie to you. This is not a quick topic to write about. When it comes to Azure, you absolutely, 100% cannot dive straight in and consume services if you’re planning on doing that for pretty much any size organisation. The only way this could be averted is in a development environment, or a home lab. Period.

Without order nothing exists.

-someone awesome

This is where an Azure reference architecture comes in. Let’s define a reference architecture, or most commonly a reference architecture document (or series of documents);

Within IT: A reference architecture is a set of standards, best practices and guidelines for a given architecture that architects, consultants, administrators or managers refer to when making decisions on future implementations in that environment.

Since I think I’ve reached the word quota limit for “architect” or “architecture”, I will attempt to limit the use of those from this point forward. If necessary, I’ll refer to either of those as just the “a-word“.

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