A tale of two products (don’t expect Dickens)

30th of January, 2019 / / No Comments

At Re:Invent and just after, AWS released several new products. Included in those were AWS FSx Windows and AWS Backup. Both of these products had a lot of interest for me, for various reasons, so I thought I’d give them a try. None of my experience was under work conditions, but the following are my experiences. Note: Both are only in a small number of regions, currently.

AWS FSx Windows

Pros:

  • Easy setup (by itself)
  • Fully compatible Windows file server
  • DFS support
  • Has backups
  • Works as expected

Cons:

  • Requires AWS Microsoft AD in each VPC
  • Can’t change file share size
  • Some features can only be changed from CLI
  • Throughput can only be changed through restore
  • Minimum share size is 300GB

First out of the box, and released at Re:Invent is AWS FSx Windows.… [Keep reading] “A tale of two products (don’t expect Dickens)”

Weekly AWS update: Friday 25th January 2019

28th of January, 2019 / / No Comments

Well, it’s Australia Day weekend once again and our friends over at Amazon Web Services have been keeping themselves very busy this last week with several key announcements and releases that have a special place in the heart of us Australians. This article continues the weekly series we are doing this year to help customers with a brief overview of the happenings within the AWS world over the last week to try and help surface some of the more important announcements.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS update: Friday 25th January 2019”

Weekly AWS update: Friday 18th January 2019

21st of January, 2019 / / No Comments

Another week into 2019 and we have more activities happening in the world of Amazon Web Services. This article continues the weekly series we are doing this year to help customers with a brief overview of the happenings within the AWS world over the last week to try and help surface some of the more important announcements. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all the updates and changes to the AWS eco-system, but simply a summary of changes that might have an impact on the business and trends we at Kloud are seeing within the industry.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS update: Friday 18th January 2019”

Automating Azure Instrumentation and Monitoring – Part 3: Custom Metrics

16th of January, 2019 / / 1 Comment

One of the core data types that Azure Monitor works with is metrics – numerical pieces of data that represent the state of an Azure resource or of an application component at a specific point in time. Azure publishes built-in metrics for almost all Azure services, and these metrics are available for querying interactively as well as for use within alerts and other systems. In addition to the Azure-published metrics, we can also publish our own custom metrics.… [Keep reading] “Automating Azure Instrumentation and Monitoring – Part 3: Custom Metrics”

Deploying and managing a Static Website using Gatsby, S3 and GitLab: Part 1

16th of January, 2019 / / No Comments

Running a website has always been a pain for organisations. From renting servers, installing and managing software, security patches and version upgrades… not to mention the 24×7 support team needed to monitor it and fix it when it breaks. All this required effort sets the bar quite high for launching a new website, even when all you want to do is run a simple landing site or launch your own blog. Well, through the wonders of the AWS cloud and a few simple services… it doesn’t need to be that hard.… [Keep reading] “Deploying and managing a Static Website using Gatsby, S3 and GitLab: Part 1”

Weekly AWS update: Friday 11th January 2019

11th of January, 2019 / / No Comments

Well, for a lot of people (myself included) we have now finished our first week back at work for 2019 and the teams over at Amazon Web Services are already hard at work releasing new products, services and even a couple of price reductions to help start off the 2019 year. This article forms the first of a weekly series we will be doing this year to help customers with a brief overview of the happenings within the AWS world over the last week to try and help surface some of the more important announcements.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS update: Friday 11th January 2019”

Active Directory User Migration in Hybrid Exchange Environment Using ADMT – Part6

10th of January, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Security Translation – Local Profiles and things to consider for end user experience

The last bit of any migration project is to keep the end user experience as simple and smooth as possible. So, by now we have successfully migrated the groups, migrated the users keeping their mailboxes intact and providing them access to all their resources using SID history. As the last bit of the migration I would like to discuss about few things that should be considered from an end user’s perspective to make their experience good when they login to the new domain.… [Keep reading] “Active Directory User Migration in Hybrid Exchange Environment Using ADMT – Part6”

Active Directory User Migration in Hybrid Exchange Environment Using ADMT – Part5

10th of January, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Users Migration

The gun seems to be pretty much loaded with all the ammunition, ready to fire? Probably not yet …

Here I want to discuss about few basic things that are easily missed and can cause the migration to fail or go wrong. Few things worth noting down before getting into the migration:

  • Make sure you have a plan to provide the permissions of file shares that built-in groups in source domain have access to.
… [Keep reading] “Active Directory User Migration in Hybrid Exchange Environment Using ADMT – Part5”

Active Directory User Migration in Hybrid Exchange Environment Using ADMT – Part4

9th of January, 2019 / / No Comments

Active Directory Groups

Now that we have got our both the AD environments ready to start the migration and installed all the required tools, let’s start moving the objects over. To ensure that we have the proper security structure in place before users are migrated to target domain, we’ll be dealing with Active Directory groups before migrating any of the user objects.

So, what is an AD group? How is the security structure controlled by these groups?… [Keep reading] “Active Directory User Migration in Hybrid Exchange Environment Using ADMT – Part4”

Active Directory User Migration in Hybrid Exchange Environment Using ADMT – Part3

8th of January, 2019 / / No Comments

Installation and configuration of ADMT tool and Password Export Server

Now that we have got our active directories in both source and target domain ready for migration, let’s install the tools required for migration.

ADMT Migration Account

The ADMT service account needs to have administrative rights in both source and target domains. It’s a good idea to create a user specifically for the ADMT Migration, however you may still use an existing user if desired. A single service account will be used for the entire migration:

  • In the target domain, create an administrator account

Target Domain:

  • In the source domain add the same user to the built-in Administrators group (it can’t be added directly to domain admins group).
… [Keep reading] “Active Directory User Migration in Hybrid Exchange Environment Using ADMT – Part3”