Windows Azure Self-Service Management with System Center App Controller

25th of February, 2014 / / No Comments

Windows Azure empowers everyone access to world-class Cloud computing and its potential. Few questions came up from enterprises:

  • How do we delegate authority on my Enterprise Azure subscription?
  • How do we create a user role with the authority to carry out specific tasks?
  • How do we provide self-service portal with Active Directory integration?

App Controller can be the answer for all the questions above. App Controller is one of the System Center family products. App Controller provides a single interface for admins to manage both public and private clouds.… [Keep reading] “Windows Azure Self-Service Management with System Center App Controller”

Best Practices for Managing Azure Subscriptions in Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets

23rd of February, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets makes it nice and easy to get started managing your Windows Azure services. Using the Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile cmdlet you can login into your WAZ subscription and fetch the details you need to manage your cloud services. PowerShell even saves these details locally so you can reuse them again in the future. This is great for personal accounts and small teams getting to know the Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets. However in larger organisations this can quickly lead to management issues and security risks.… [Keep reading] “Best Practices for Managing Azure Subscriptions in Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets”

Windows Azure Active Directory Self Service Password Reset

10th of December, 2013 / / 1 Comment

Microsoft has recently released an enhancement to its Windows Azure Active Directory (WAAD) offering. This enhancement enables end users to perform self-service password resets in the case of a forgotten password. Previously this function was available to administrative accounts only.

WAAD self-service password reset (SSPR) is a premium offering, requiring Premium Features to be enabled for the WAAD.

Once WAAD Premium Features are enabled, the User Password Reset Policy can be edited and SSPR enabled. For the initial release, enabling SSPR does so for all WAAD user accounts.… [Keep reading] “Windows Azure Active Directory Self Service Password Reset”

Updating your AWS bootstrap

19th of August, 2013 / / 6 Comments

In Bootstrapping AWS we looked at what’s required to kick off a brand new installation with your latest build.  But it’s two weeks later now – and you’re about to release version 2 of the application.  Using the Cloud Formation script we created first, it’s actually quite easy.

In the first build script, there was a reference in the CloudFormation Metadata to the website source – being {“Ref” : “BuildNumber”}.

"Parameters" : {
  "BuildNumber" : {
  "Type" : "Number"
  }
}

So the process is as follows.… [Keep reading] “Updating your AWS bootstrap”

Bootstrapping on AWS

5th of August, 2013 / / 11 Comments

The Task

This post is going to look at the process of hosting a highly available corporate website using Windows Server 2012 Amazon Machine Image (AMI), and bootstrapping the installation of Internet Information Services (IIS), urlrewrite, and our website. We don’t need a golden image as we release software every week. We also want to make sure that it is a high availability solution, so we need to look at scaling groups and repeatability.

Our high availability solution will contain one load balancer, and a minimum of two Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances across multiple availability zones (AZ’s).  … [Keep reading] “Bootstrapping on AWS”

AWS Web Architecture 101 – Lessons Learned

24th of July, 2013 / / No Comments

This blog discusses some of the lessons learned in implementing a Web Architecture with RDS. We walk through some key elements and highlight some gotchas  to be mindful of.

Scenario

The components for this scenario include:

  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with a public subnet and a private subnet.
  • ELB for  Web Traffic
  • IIS Web Server instance
  • MS SQL RDS instance
  • Jump box for management connectivity

One of the first implementation considerations in AWS is how you will setup your network.… [Keep reading] “AWS Web Architecture 101 – Lessons Learned”

Windows Azure Active Directory Module and Online Services Sign-in Assistant

18th of July, 2013 / / 2 Comments

Back in 2012, we talked about Office 365 – PowerShell Setup.  This was back in the days prior to the Microsoft Online Services Sign-in Assistant RTW, and before Windows 8 had gained a lot of traction.  Recent updates however have not made this such a straightforward process.

My first attempt at installing the Windows Azure Active Directory Module on Windows 8 failed with the error “must have microsoft online services sign-in assistant version 7.0 or greated installed”.  … [Keep reading] “Windows Azure Active Directory Module and Online Services Sign-in Assistant”

ELBs do not cater for your environment? Set up HAProxy for your IIS servers

4th of July, 2013 / / 9 Comments

Recently we encountered a scenario where we needed to look for an alternative for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) due to an existing IIS configuration used in an organisation.  We found that HAProxy was the best candidate in terms of simplicity & the suitability for scenario we were addressing.

This post will show you how you can leverage HAProxy to load balance IIS web servers hosted in AWS EC2 and explain briefly why HAProxy is best suited to address our scenario.… [Keep reading] “ELBs do not cater for your environment? Set up HAProxy for your IIS servers”

The changing role of the CIO

4th of July, 2013 / / No Comments

With the growth and commoditization of computing resource, and the inevitable introduction of cloud computing, both as a software, platform and infrastructure services, the Chief Information Officer’s role will change significantly over the next two years.  Cloud computing provides incredible agility for those organizations equipped to utilize it, Business Process Outsourcing is providing increasing levels of workforce flexibility, and with the commoditization of design and development resources, how does this rapid ability to affect change effect the CIO?… [Keep reading] “The changing role of the CIO”

Office 365: To Federate or Not to Federate… that is the Question

5th of June, 2013 / / 8 Comments

Yesterday, Microsoft released a new version of their ‘DirSync’ utility (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn246918.aspx) which up until yesterday provided a basic ‘copy’ of your local Active Directory accounts (Active Directory Domain Service or ‘AD DS’) from your premises to the MS Cloud directory (referred to as ‘Azure Active Directory’) for Office 365 (and other Cloud apps such as Team Foundation Service (TFS Online).

This blog is written for those considering moving to Office 365 (or have moved to Office 365) but haven’t identified any other application in the organisation apart from Office 365 that requires Active Directory Federation Services and SAML/WS.Federation… [Keep reading] “Office 365: To Federate or Not to Federate… that is the Question”