November is the new Christmas – At least for fans of AWS

1st of December, 2019 / / No Comments
It’s no secret within the halls of Telstra Purple that the end of November is my favourite time of year, and as a Cloud Architect that lives in the land of AWS…. why wouldn’t this be everybody’s  favourite time of year?
Firstly, for the whole month of November Team Orange slam us with a non stop onslaught of new features and product accounements. In fact, if we have a look at the AWS What’s New page https://aws.amazon.com/new
… [Keep reading] “November is the new Christmas – At least for fans of AWS”

Interesting Azure announcements at Ignite 2019

8th of November, 2019 / / No Comments

The big one: Azure Arc

Announced: November 4th, 2019
Source: Azure services now run anywhere with new hybrid capabilities: Announcing Azure Arc

I read recently a stat that said that some ~90% of all workloads are still run on-premises. That’s mind blowing to think that there’s still so much potential for cloud utilisation and workload transformation. This seems like part of the driver for the announcement of Azure Arc – “a set of technologies that unlocks new hybrid scenarios for customers by bringing Azure services and management to any infrastructure.… [Keep reading] “Interesting Azure announcements at Ignite 2019”

How to bypass the Microsoft AAD login Screen for a Federated SSO User when access an AAD integrated application

31st of October, 2019 / / 1 Comment

As more organisations are integrating their SAML applications to AAD instead of ADFS to take advantage of the Azure AD Conditional Access Policy. One user experience issue of the change is that federated users (e.g. using ADFS for single-sign on) are first redirected to default MS AAD Login page. Only when they have entered their UPN, they are redirected to the ADFS page to sign in.

Many customers and end-users have asked if they can be redirected straight to the ADFS page, bypassing the MS login page, especially when migrating an existing ADFS federated application to AAD.… [Keep reading] “How to bypass the Microsoft AAD login Screen for a Federated SSO User when access an AAD integrated application”

Azure Front Door with WAF Policies – An overview

17th of October, 2019 / / No Comments

If you have been working with Azure Infrastructure services, then you would have come across Core Network offerings such as Azure Traffic manager, Azure Load balancers & Application Gateways. These network services provide solutions for applications that require high availability, security & scalability, but they also come with their own limitations.  One such limitation is that they primarily exist in single regions (regional services). Azure Traffic manager for instance, which works at the DNS level for cross region support, cannot perform path-based routing and the failover time is based on TTL of the DNS record.… [Keep reading] “Azure Front Door with WAF Policies – An overview”

SSM Endpoints – A How To

29th of September, 2019 / / No Comments

AWS Simple Systems Manager (SSM or Systems Manager) is an AWS service for bulk management of EC2 instances, and on-premises servers too. Like many AWS services though, it is accessed via the internet. This means that:

  1. you need some way to access the service
  2. the control data is going out over the internet

Getting around statement a. is pretty easy, either have a direct internet connection or you can configure the SSM agent to use a proxy.  … [Keep reading] “SSM Endpoints – A How To”

AWS Data Lifecycle Manager Update

28th of June, 2019 / / No Comments

This one slipped a bit under the radar, but the other week there was a big change for people running Date Lifecycle Manager (DLM). In my colleague Matt’s weekly AWS update on May 31st, he mentioned the “snapshot across multiple EBS volumes” update. On first glance this didn’t seem to be a big deal. Yep, you can now take multi-volume snapshots in a consistent manner. As a backup person, this is good news, but not much more than a footnote.… [Keep reading] “AWS Data Lifecycle Manager Update”

Weekly AWS Update: Friday 31st May 2019

31st of May, 2019 / / No Comments

Well, it’s the end of autumn, and if the weather in Melbourne is anything to go by, winter’s here. Regardless, here we are with another weekly look at the goodies AWS have given us over the week. In this weeks update, we take a look at an extensive collection of releases from across the platform. We have more updates to EBS functionality. Amazon Connect adds additional Telephony Metadata, opening up new routing possibility. And some exciting features added to Amplify and CloudFormation.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS Update: Friday 31st May 2019”

Building “Dial a Joke” Part 1 – Using Lambda functions with Amazon Connect

28th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

In this article, we take a look at how to add AWS Lambda functions to our Amazon Connect Contact Flows. This will be the first in a series of articles where we build our very own “Dial A Joke” Service. That’s right, we’re going back to the ’90s using 2019 technology. Throughout this project, we will be taking a look at:

  • Adding Lambda Functions to Contact Flows for dynamic response generation
  • defining and leveraging call variables
  • Using Lambda responses to drive Contact Flow decision making and conditional logic flows
  • Implementing and triggering outbound calls from Amazon Connect
  • a basic introduction to SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language

If you haven’t already taken a look at Amazon Connect, you can take a look at some of our previous articles.… [Keep reading] “Building “Dial a Joke” Part 1 – Using Lambda functions with Amazon Connect”

Weekly AWS Update: Friday 24th May 2019 – Part 2

26th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

And we’re back with part 2 of our weekly update. In this, the second part of our weekly update we are taking a look at all of the RDS releases. And over the last week, there has been a lot of them. Over the last week, We’ve got an update to RDS Recommendations for Amazon Aurora. Password validation support is now available for MySQL and a bunch of performance and feature uplifts.

Each of the AWS Weekly updates we publish on this blog isn’t an exhaustive list of all the week’s updates.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS Update: Friday 24th May 2019 – Part 2”

Weekly AWS Update: Friday 24th May 2019 – Part 1

25th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

It’s Friday again, and that means it’s time we take another look at the releases and announcements made by AWS. Like always, we have a lot to cover this week and there are a few things everybody. In fact, there is so much to cover this week, we actually had to break it up into two separate articles. In this article, we look at the ability to add additional website authorization providers to WorkLink. We also have an update on AWS Ground Station and changes to Amazon Worklink.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS Update: Friday 24th May 2019 – Part 1”