Cloud Cushioning using Azure Queues

1st of March, 2016 / / 1 Comment

The distributed world

The cloud revolution has revived the importance of distributed computing in today’s enterprise market with the distribution of compute and storage workloads across multiple decoupled resources helping corporates optimise their capital and operational expenditure.

While there are benefits of moving to the cloud, it’s important to understand the ground rules of the cloud platform. Running your business critical services on commodity hardware with a service SLA of three nines (99.9) against five nines (99.999) does call for some precautions.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Cushioning using Azure Queues”

Background business – Azure Worker role Vs Web Job

29th of February, 2016 / / 7 Comments

Importance of asynchronous work loads

Background processes play a key role in enabling distributed asynchronous computing. Background tasks have been used in the past to handle secondary workloads like logging, monitoring, scheduling and notifications, but today’s systems use background processing to improve user experience by decoupling User Interfaces from heavier tasks. Microsoft Azure provides two ways to host background tasks:

  • Worker Roles (PaaS)
  • Web Jobs (API apps. SaaS)

Worker Roles are dedicated virtual machines which can be pictured as an executable unit of work, unlike Web Jobs.… [Keep reading] “Background business – Azure Worker role Vs Web Job”

Microsoft Azure Stack is the New Hybrid Cloud

4th of February, 2016 / / No Comments

Last week Microsoft released the public technical preview of new Azure Stack. Azure Stack, along with its predecessor Windows Azure Pack, gives anyone the ability to extend Azure management capabilities to their on-premises datacentre.

Firstly, a bit of background.

With Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft made available Windows Azure Pack. Azure Pack offered an on-premise integration point between Windows Server, System Centre, and SQL Server to offer a self-service portal and private cloud services including virtual machine provisioning and management (IaaS), database as a services (DBaaS), and scalable web application hosting (PaaS).… [Keep reading] “Microsoft Azure Stack is the New Hybrid Cloud”

Secure Azure Virtual Network Defense In Depth using Network Security Groups, User Defined Routes and Barracuda NG Firewall

25th of August, 2015 / / 3 Comments

Security Challenge on Azure

There are few common security related questions when we start planning migration to Azure:

  • How can we restrict the ingress and egress traffic on Azure ?
  • How can we route the traffic on Azure ?
  • Can we have Firewall kit, Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), Network Access Control, Application Control and Anti – Malware on Azure DMZ ?

This blog post intention is to answer above questions using following Azure features combined with Security Virtual Appliance available on Azure Marketplace:

  • Azure Virtual Network (VNET)
  • Azure Network Security Groups (NSGs)
  • Azure Network Security Rule
  • Azure Forced Tunelling
  • Azure Route Table
  • Azure IP Forwarding
  • Barracuda NG Firewall available on Azure Marketplace

One of the most common methods of attack is The Script Kiddie / Skiddie / Script Bunny / Script Kitty.… [Keep reading] “Secure Azure Virtual Network Defense In Depth using Network Security Groups, User Defined Routes and Barracuda NG Firewall”

Azure ExpressRoute in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange

1st of July, 2015 / / 4 Comments

Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute provides dedicated, private circuits between your WAN or datacentre and private networks you build in the Microsoft Azure public cloud. There are two types of ExpressRoute connections – Network (NSP) based and Exchange (IXP) based with each allowing us to extend our infrastructure by providing connectivity that is:

  • Private: the circuit is isolated using industry-standard VLANs – the traffic never traverses the public Internet when connecting to Azure VNETs and, when using the public peer, even Azure services with public endpoints such as Storage and Azure SQL Database.
… [Keep reading] “Azure ExpressRoute in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange”

Kerberos Web Application Configuration and Federation.

4th of June, 2015 / / 2 Comments

I’ve spent a lot of time at a client site recently working on a large complex application migration project. In my scenario, the client is migrating applications from another domain, to their own. There are no domain trusts in place, so you could consider it as an acquisition/merger type scenario.

One of the common challenges often encountered in this type of work is troubleshooting Kerberos authentication process for web apps. Once the concepts of Kerberos authentication are understood, the process is relatively straight forward.… [Keep reading] “Kerberos Web Application Configuration and Federation.”

Automate your Cloud Operations Part 2: AWS CloudFormation

16th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Stacking the AWS CloudFormation

Automate your Cloud Operations blog post Part 1 have given us the basic understanding on how to automate the AWS stack using CloudFormation.

This post will help the reader on how to layer the stack on top of the existing AWS CloudFormation stack using AWS CloudFormation instead of modifying the base template. AWS resources can be added into existing VPC using the outputs detailing the resources from the main VPC stack instead of having to modify the main template.… [Keep reading] “Automate your Cloud Operations Part 2: AWS CloudFormation”

Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator

16th of March, 2015 / / 5 Comments

Originally posted in Lucian’s blog over at lucian.blog.

Whether you’re wanting to deploy a new workload in Microsoft Azure, wanting to extend an existing workload via a hybrid scenario or like me wanting to use Azure outside of work to gain more knowledge and experience, the pay-as-you-go charge model can often times intimidate and even deter many from using a cloud service like Azure. From a lab or dev point of view, it is all well and good to dabble in Azure at the various tiers of engagement, but at the end of the day you could be left with a credit card bill allot larger than expected. Enter the Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator where you can accurately estimate your potential usage for any given service.

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The Business Case for Microsoft Office 365

10th of November, 2014 / / No Comments

Businesses of all sizes and industries are considering adopting Microsoft Office 365. Some customers have a clear vision of the desired capabilities. Others have weighed up the options and identified that there are savings to be leveraged. Others still have heard the hype, but don’t know where to start.

Office 365, like any technology, offers a variety of solutions and risks to any business. Kloud has extensive skills and experience in Microsoft Office 365 and have assisted many commercial and public sector enterprise customers successfully navigate the journey onto Office 365.… [Keep reading] “The Business Case for Microsoft Office 365”

Testing your mobile app – plan ahead before it’s too late

10th of November, 2014 / / 1 Comment

More than ever before, organisations are now preparing themselves to engage with their customers not only to attract business but also to get to know them better. This proliferation of information makes it possible to personalise user experience for a targeted audience. Building your own Mobile App is a great medium to achieve that. But be cautious – a poorly rated app can ruin everything!

The inspiration for this blog is a piece of work that we did for one of our customer few months back.… [Keep reading] “Testing your mobile app – plan ahead before it’s too late”