Azure Bastion’s current annoying limitation

28th of January, 2020 / / No Comments

Originally posted on here at https://lucian.blog. Follow Lucian on Twitter @lucianfrango.

Since this service stumbled on the open web by way of a leak in June 2019 and having used it for a while now in preview plus since its been GA- for me this seems to be the best way to conduct secure remote access to IaaS infrastructure in Azure.

The idea of not having to deploy any internet accessible infrastructure (not having to open up TCP22 or TCP3389) to the avalanche of 1337 h4x0rs trying to gain access to anything and everything on those ports is great news.

… [Keep reading] “Azure Bastion’s current annoying limitation”

Wednesday AWS Wrapup – Wednesday 22nd January 2020

24th of January, 2020 / / No Comments

Welcome to 2020 (all be it a bit belated) and the first AWS Weekly Wrap-up for 2020. For those of you who followed my weekly updates last year, welcome back. For those of are new to these weekly posts, I like to take time each week to review the recent announcements from Amazon Web Services and outline the ones that my customers appear interested in.

As always, This list is a summary of the recent releases and announcements made by AWS and is far from exhaustive.… [Keep reading] “Wednesday AWS Wrapup – Wednesday 22nd January 2020”

0.09 ms latency using Azure Proximity Placement Groups

14th of January, 2020 / / 2 Comments

Reducing network latency for critical apps running on Azure IaaS has become easier since Microsoft’s announcement of General Availability for Proximity Placement Groups (PPG) on Dec 2019.

Today I’ll give you a quick intro to Proximity Placement Groups demonstrating how to deploy a test environment into your Azure Subscription using one of my favourite tools AzureCLI. I’ll also test network latency with a PPG and without to show you the difference.

If you’re undecided about using AzureCLI or ARM templates for your Azure deployments have a look @ Pascal Naber’s post https://pascalnaber.wordpress.com/2018/11/11/stop-using-arm-templates-use-the-azure-cli-instead/

… [Keep reading] “0.09 ms latency using Azure Proximity Placement Groups”

A look into CloudFormation resource import

14th of January, 2020 / / No Comments

Just before re:Invent, AWS launched a new feature for CloudFormation … Create Stack with existing resources! This gives a lot of options to start to manage existing resources as code, if they were created via GUI or CLI. Apart from that though, it now gives you the ability to move resources between stacks, rename stacks, etc.

There is a pretty good AWS blog, but there are some things the blog really didn’t cover too well.… [Keep reading] “A look into CloudFormation resource import”

Intro to AWS Amplify: build a multi-tenant SaaS app – Part 3: Deployment Setup

8th of January, 2020 / / No Comments

Deployment Setup

This is Part 3 of my “Intro to AWS Amplify”. If you haven’t already, you can find the previous articles in the series below:

Part Description
Part 1: Preparation This article provides an introduction and instructions on creating the required AWS environment.
Part 2: App Setup This section outlines the steps to set up out new Amplify application and host it in a repository.

Overview

By now you should have your react application bootstrapped and the amplify project initialized and committed to a git repository.… [Keep reading] “Intro to AWS Amplify: build a multi-tenant SaaS app – Part 3: Deployment Setup”

Intro to AWS Amplify: build a multi-tenant SaaS app – Part 2: Application Setup

7th of January, 2020 / / No Comments

Application Setup

This is Part 2 of my “Intro to AWS Amplify”. If you haven’t already, you can find the previous articles in the series below:

Part Description
Part 1: Preparation This article provides an introduction and instructions on creating the required AWS environment.

Overview

Continuing on from Part 1,  you should by now have your Cloud9 instance configured and ready to go. In this article, we will install the required libraries in our Cloud9 instance and bootstrap our Amplify Application.… [Keep reading] “Intro to AWS Amplify: build a multi-tenant SaaS app – Part 2: Application Setup”

Getting Started: Intro to AWS Amplify: build a multi-tenant SaaS app

6th of January, 2020 / / No Comments

Getting Started: Intro to AWS Amplify: build a multi-tenant SaaS app

What is this?

As we get started with the new year I thought I’d take the opportunity to start publishing a different type of article this year. Today begins a new series of articles where I will walk through the process of building out a web application using AWS Amplify. It will be a typical todo application written in React and Node JS and we’ll use the Amplify CLI to configure and deploy it into both a test and production environment.… [Keep reading] “Getting Started: Intro to AWS Amplify: build a multi-tenant SaaS app”

Diary of a re:Invent newbie

30th of December, 2019 / / No Comments

Wow, so the end of the year has quickly run up and I’ve finally found some time to write this up. While re:Invent was a few weeks ago, I took a few days vacation on my way home and then it’s been busy busy busy since. So, in the lead up, I’d watched the “How to re:Invent” videos and had advice from our senior AWS guy, Matt. I’d say the advice was pretty good and I made the most of my time.… [Keep reading] “Diary of a re:Invent newbie”

AWS Re:Invent Day 1

4th of December, 2019 / / No Comments

And here we are at AWS Re:Invent 2019 coming off all of the announcements and happenings for the week. Today’s article is going to cover off all the day 0 and Day 1 announcements that have come out of Midnight Madness and Monday Night Live. The complete list of announcements from Day 0 and 1 are:

  • AWS DeepComposer – Compose Music with Generative Machine Learning Models
  • New AWS Program to Help Future-proof Your End-of-Support Windows Server Applications
  • A New, Simplified, Bring-Your-Own-License Experience for Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server
  • Automate OS Image Build Pipelines with EC2 Image Builder
  • Amazon Transcribe Medical – Real-Time Automatic Speech Recognition for Healthcare Customers
  • Identify Unintended Resource Access with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer

AWS DeepComposer – Compose Music with Generative Machine Learning Models

AWS has made a little bit of a habit over the last few years of releasing new hardware at Re:Invent.… [Keep reading] “AWS Re:Invent Day 1”

AWS November Announcement Review – Part 2

4th of December, 2019 / / No Comments

In my last article (available here), I walked through a number of announcements that AWS made over the first couple of weeks in November. Continuing on from there this article covers the announcements from the second half of the month. This will hopefully set us up to tackle the wave of announcements that will come out during Re: Invent.

When we look at the announcements over the second half of November we can see a couple of recurring themes:

Developer Features

There where a number of new features that clearly make life easier for the developer community.… [Keep reading] “AWS November Announcement Review – Part 2”