Building a Breakfast Ordering Skill for Amazon Alexa – Part 1

25th of June, 2018 / / No Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Introduction

At the AWS Summit Sydney this year, Telstra decided to host a breakfast session for some of their VIP clients. This was more of a networking session, to get to know the clients much better. However, instead of having a “normal” breakfast session, we decided to take it up one level 😉
Breakfast ordering is quite “boring” if you ask me 😉 The waitress comes to the table, gives you a menu and asks what you would like to order.… [Keep reading] “Building a Breakfast Ordering Skill for Amazon Alexa – Part 1”

Using AWS EC2 Instances to train a Convolutional Neural Network to identify Cows and Horses

14th of June, 2018 / / No Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Background

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a hobby of mine for years now. After playing with it approximately 8 years back, I let it lapse till early this year, and boy oh boy, how things have matured! There are products in the market these days that use some form of ML – some examples are Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa.
Computational power has increased to the point where calcuations that took months can now be done within days.… [Keep reading] “Using AWS EC2 Instances to train a Convolutional Neural Network to identify Cows and Horses”

Major Incident Management – Inputs and Outputs

7th of June, 2018 / / No Comments

Definition

A major incident is an incident that results in significant disruption to the business and demands a response beyond the routine incident management process.
The Major Incident Management Process applies globally to all Customers and includes Incidents resulting in a service outage.  This process is triggered by Incidents directly raised by Users or via referral from the Event Management Process, which are classified as Major Incidents in the Incident Management Process by the Service Desk.… [Keep reading] “Major Incident Management – Inputs and Outputs”

Cloud Operations Model and Project Stream – Considerations

2nd of June, 2018 / / No Comments

Background

Cloud operations stream is responsible for designing and operation of the cloud model for the project and BAU activities. This stream is primarily responsible for people, process, tools and information. The model can change as the organisation’s requirements and type of business.  

Aspects – Cloud Operations Model

Below is an example of key aspects that we need to consider when defining Cloud Operations Model.
aspects 2.jpg

Cloud Operations Stream  – High Level Approach

Below is an example model for how to track a cloud program operationally.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Operations Model and Project Stream – Considerations”

Deploying an Active Directory Forest using AWS CloudFormation

27th of May, 2018 / / 1 Comment

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Introduction

Wow, it is amazing how time flies. Almost two years ago, I wrote a set of blogs that showed how one can use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates and Desired State Configuration (DSC) scripts to deploy an Active Directory Forest automatically.
For those that would like to take a trip down memory lane, here is the link to the blog.
Recently, I have been playing with AWS CloudFormation and I am simply in awe by its power.… [Keep reading] “Deploying an Active Directory Forest using AWS CloudFormation”

'Strong Name Verification' Issue with adding new Connectors in AAD Connect

21st of May, 2018 / / No Comments

I’ve been updating and installing the latest versions of AAD Connect recently (v1.1.750.0 to the latest v1.1.819.0) and noticed that I could not create a brand new custom ‘Connector’ using any of the following out of the box Connector templates:

  • Generic SQL
  • Generic LDAP (didn’t happen to me but I’ve seen reports it’s impacting others)
  • PowerShell
  • Web Service

The message in the AAD Connect Synchronisation Engine would appear as:
“The extension could not be loaded”
each time I tried to create a Connector with any of the above templates.… [Keep reading] “'Strong Name Verification' Issue with adding new Connectors in AAD Connect”

Key Vault Secrets and ARM Templates

15th of May, 2018 / / No Comments

What is Azure Key Vault

Azure Key Vault helps safeguard cryptographic keys and secrets used by cloud applications and services. By using Key Vault, you can encrypt keys and secrets (such as authentication keys, storage account keys, data encryption keys, .PFX files, and passwords) using keys protected by hardware security modules (HSMs).
Key Vault streamlines the key management process and enables you to maintain control of keys that access and encrypt your data. Developers can create keys for development and testing in minutes, and then seamlessly migrate them to production keys.… [Keep reading] “Key Vault Secrets and ARM Templates”

Deploying a SailPoint IdentityNow Virtual Appliance in Azure

3rd of May, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

The CentOS image that SailPoint provide for the IdentityNow Virtual Appliance that performs integration between ‘Sources’ and IdentityNow is VMWare based. I don’t have any VMWare Infrastructure to run it on and really didn’t want to run up any VMWare environments for this component. All my other infrastructure is in Azure. I’d love to run my VA(s) in Azure too.
In discussions with SailPoint I understand it is simply a case that they haven’t certified their CentOS image on Azure.… [Keep reading] “Deploying a SailPoint IdentityNow Virtual Appliance in Azure”

Demystifying Managed Service Identities on Azure

13th of April, 2018 / / 5 Comments

Managed service identities (MSIs) are a great feature of Azure that are being gradually enabled on a number of different resource types. But when I’m talking to developers, operations engineers, and other Azure customers, I often find that there is some confusion and uncertainty about what they do. In this post I will explain what MSIs are and are not, where they make sense to use, and give some general advice on how to work with them.… [Keep reading] “Demystifying Managed Service Identities on Azure”

Deploy active/active FortiGate NGFW in Azure

10th of April, 2018 / / 22 Comments

I recently was tasked with deploying two Fortinet FortiGate firewalls in Azure in a highly available active/active model. I quickly discovered that there is currently only two deployment types available in the Azure marketplace, a single VM deployment and a high availability deployment (which is an active/passive model and wasn’t what I was after).
FG NGFW Marketplace Options
I did some digging around on the Fortinet support sites and discovered that to you can achieve an active/active model in Azure using dual load balancers (a public and internal Azure load balancer) as indicated in this Fortinet document: https://www.fortinet.com/content/dam/fortinet/assets/deployment-guides/dg-fortigate-high-availability-azure.pdf… [Keep reading] “Deploy active/active FortiGate NGFW in Azure”