Azure Internal Load Balancing – Setting Distribution Mode

23rd of June, 2015 / / 3 Comments

I’m going to start by saying that I totally missed that the setting of distribution mode on Azure’s Internal Load Balancer (ILB) service is possible. This is mostly because you don’t set the distribution mode at the ILB level – you set it at the Endpoint level (which in hindsight makes sense because that’s how you do it for the public load balancing too).

There is an excellent blog on the Azure site that covers distribution modes for public load balancing and the good news is that they also apply to internal load balancing as well.… [Keep reading] “Azure Internal Load Balancing – Setting Distribution Mode”

Windows 10 – First Look: Scaling on the Surface Pro 3

10th of June, 2015 / / 2 Comments

As a fellow Surface user, I love my device.

The surface is a great device, which packs plenty of performance for heavy duty workloads such as running guest virtual machines or 3d rendering. It’s also extremely light which is great for work meetings and note taking on the go. You could say the Surface is great for any task that you can throw at it, almost…

Remember the first time you plugged your brand spanking new Surface into an external display to enable a little more desktop real estate in the office?… [Keep reading] “Windows 10 – First Look: Scaling on the Surface Pro 3”

Create AWS CloudFormation Templates with Visual Studio

18th of May, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Background

AWS CloudFormation is a wonderful service for automating your AWS builds – my colleagues have done a number of detailed walk-throughs in other blog posts.

AWS also provides a toolkit for Visual Studio as an extension of the IDE.  To get started, configure the extension with your AWS IAM Access Key ID and Secret Key and you will be able to use the new AWS explorer pane to explore all AWS services such as VPC, EC2, RDS, etc.… [Keep reading] “Create AWS CloudFormation Templates with Visual Studio”

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”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) networking: public IP address and subnet list

8th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Originally posted on Lucian’s blog over at Lucian.Blog.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has many data centre’s in many continents and countries all over the world. AWS has two key grouping methods of these data centres: regions and availability zones.

It can be very handy to either reference the IP address or subnet of a particular service in say a proxy server to streamline connectivity. This is a good practice to avoid unnecessary latency via proxy authentication requests. Below is an output of Amazon Web Services IP address and subnet details split into the key categories as listed by AWS via thier publishing of information through the IP address JSON file available here.

Sidebar: Click here to read up more on regions and availability zones or click here or click here. Included in these references is also information about the DNS endpoints for services that are therefore IP address agnostic. Also, If you’d like more details about the JSON file click here.

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Automate your Cloud Operations Part 1: AWS CloudFormation

29th of April, 2015 / / 3 Comments

Operations

What is Operations?

In the IT world, Operations refers to a team or department within IT which is responsible for the running of a business’ IT systems and infrastructure.

So what kind of activities this team perform on day to day basis?

Building, modifying, provisioning, updating systems, software and infrastructure to keep them available, performing and secure which ensures that users can be as productive as possible.

When moving to public cloud platforms the areas of focus for Operations are:

  • Cost reduction: if we design it properly and apply good practices when managing it (scale down / switch off)
  • Smarter operation: Use of Automation and APIs
  • Agility: faster in provisioning infrastructure or environments by Automating the everything
  • Better Uptime: Plan for failover, and design effective DR solutions more cost effectively.
… [Keep reading] “Automate your Cloud Operations Part 1: AWS CloudFormation”

Amazon Web Services vs Microsoft Azure service comparison cheat sheet

27th of April, 2015 / / 6 Comments

Originally posted on Lucian’s blog at lucian.blog.

I’m a big fan of both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. The two clouds are redefining the way web, apps and everything on the internet is made accessible from enterprise to the average user. Both for my own benefit and for yours, here’s a detailed side by side comparison of services as well as features available in each cloud:

Cloud Service Microsoft Azure Amazon Web Services
Locations Azure Regions Global Infrastructure
  NA Availability Zones
Management Azure Portal Management Console
Azure Preview Portal NA
Powershell+Desired State Configuration Command Line Interface
Compute Services
 Cloud Services Elastic Beanstalk
Virtual Machines Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
  Batch Auto Scaling
RemoteApp Work Spaces
Web and Mobile Web Apps NA

Mobile Services Mobile SDK
API Management CloudTrail
NA Cognito
NA Mobile Analytics
Storage
 SQL Databases Relational Database Service (RDS)
DocumentDB Dynamo DB
  Redis Cache Redshift
Blob Storage Simple Storage Service (S3)
Table Storage Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Queues Simple Queue Service (SQS)
File Storage Elastic File System (EFS)
Storsimple Storage Gateway
Analytics + Big Data
 HDInsight (Hadoop) Elastic MapReduce (EMR)
Stream Analytics Kinesis
Machine Learning Machine Learning
Data Orchestration Data Factory Data Pipeline
Media Services
 Media Services Elastic Transcoder
  Visual Studio Online NA
  BizTalk Services Simple Email Service (SES)
  Backup (Recovery Services) Glacier
  CDN CloudFront
Automation Automation OpsWorks
  Scheduler CodeDeploy + CodePipeline
Service Bus Simple Workflow (SWF)
Search CloudSearch
Networking Virtual Network Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
  ExpressRoute DirectConnect
  Traffic Manager Elastic Load Balancing
  NA Route 53 (DNS)
 Management Services Resource Manager Cloud Formation
NA Trusted Adviser
Identity and Access Management
 Active Directory Directory Service
NA Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Marketplace Marketplace Marketplace
Container Support Docker VM Extensions EC2 Container Service
Compliance Trust Centre CloudHSM
Multi-factor Authentication Multi-Factor Authentication Multi-Factor Authentication
Monitoring Services Operational Insights Config
Application Insights CloudWatch
Event Hubs NA
Notification Hubs Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Key Vault Key Management Store
Government Government GovCloud
Other services Web Jobs Lambda
NA Service Catalog
Office 365 Exchange Online WorkMail
Office 365 Sharepoint Online WorkDocs

For me this comparison is an exercise to allow me to reference quickly what the major services and features are on each cloud platform.… [Keep reading] “Amazon Web Services vs Microsoft Azure service comparison cheat sheet”

SCCM 2012 R2 membership rules for mobile devices associated through InTune

22nd of April, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Originally posted on Lucian’s blog at lucian.blog.

Microsoft System Centre Configuration Manger (SCCM) 2012 R2 when extended with Microsoft InTune is a powerful EMS or MDM platform. I’ve recently implemented an integration between System Centre 2012 R2 on-prem with InTune Cloud to allow for a hybrid EMS solution at a client.

To allow for a seamless user registration or provisioning process though the Company Portal app, devices should auto enroll with the appropriate device collection which automatically then applies policies to the mobile or external device.… [Keep reading] “SCCM 2012 R2 membership rules for mobile devices associated through InTune”

Connection Options When Building An Azure Hybrid Cloud Solution

7th of April, 2015 / / 3 Comments

If your business is migrating workloads to Azure the chances are at some point you will probably want to create a form of private interconnect with Azure. There is more than one way to achieve this, so in this post I’ll take a look at what options you have and the most appropriate scenarios for each.

We’ll work through the connection types from simplest (and quickest to provision) to more complex (where you’ll need IP networking expertise and hardware).… [Keep reading] “Connection Options When Building An Azure Hybrid Cloud Solution”

Hybrid Exchange Connectivity with Azure Traffic Manager

31st of March, 2015 / / 3 Comments

Does your exchange hybrid architecture need to have redundancy? How about an active/passive solution using Azure Traffic Manager elimating the need for a HLB device in your DMZ.

Currently there is a few topologies for configuring Hybrid Exchange with Office 365;

  1. Single Hybrid Server
  2. 2+ Hybrid Server behind a load balancer
  3. 2+ Hybrid Server with DNS round robin

A simple solution to make a redundant Hybrid Exchange design without using a HLB is to leverage Azure Traffic Manager to monitor and service the DNS namespace configured in on-premises Exchange and Office 365 configuration.… [Keep reading] “Hybrid Exchange Connectivity with Azure Traffic Manager”