Exchange Online & Splunk – Automating the solution

13th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

NOTES FROM THE FIELD:

I have recently been consulting on, what I think is a pretty cool engagement to integrate some Office365 mailbox data into the Splunk reporting platform.
I initially thought about using a .csv export methodology however through trial & error (more error than trial if I’m being honest), and realising that this method still required some manual interaction, I decided to embark on finding a fully automated solution.
The final solution comprises the below components:

  • Splunk HTTP event collector
    • Splunk hostname
    • Token from HTTP event collector config page
  • Azure automation account
    • Azure Run As Account
    • Azure Runbook
    • Exchange Online credentials (registered to Azure automation account

I’m not going to run through the creation of the automation account, or required credentials as these had already been created, however there is a great guide to configuring the solution I have used for this customer at  https://www.splunk.com/blog/2017/10/05/splunking-microsoft-cloud-data-part-3.html… [Keep reading] “Exchange Online & Splunk – Automating the solution”

Using Visual Studio with Github to Test New Azure CLI Features

27th of October, 2017 / / No Comments

Following the Azure Managed Kubernetes announcement yesterday, I immediately upgraded my Azure CLI on Windows 10 so I could try it out.
Unfortunately I discovered there was a bug with retrieving credentials for your newly created Kubernetes cluster – the command bombs with the following error:

C:\Users\rafb> az aks get-credentials --resource-group myK8Group --name myCluster
[Errno 13] Permission denied: 'C:\\Users\\rafb\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\tmpn4goit44'
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Azure\CLI2\lib\site-packages\azure\cli\main.py", line 36, in main
 cmd_result = APPLICATION.execute(args)
… [Keep reading] “Using Visual Studio with Github to Test New Azure CLI Features”

Preparing your Docker container for Azure App Services

22nd of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Similar to other cloud platforms, Azure is starting to leverage containers to provide flexible managed environments for us to run Applications. The App Service on Linux being such a case, allows us to bring in our own home-baked Docker images containing all the tools we need to make our Apps work.
This service is still in preview and obviously has a few limitations:

… [Keep reading] “Preparing your Docker container for Azure App Services”

Static Security Analysis of Container Images with CoreOS Clair

21st of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Container security is (or should be) a concern to anyone running software on Docker Containers. Gone are the days when running random Images found on the internet was common place. Security guides for Containers are common now: examples from Microsoft and others can be found easily online.
The two leading Container Orchestrators also offer their own security guides: Kubernetes Security Best Practices and Docker security.

Container Image Origin

One of the single biggest factors in Container security is determined by the origin of container Images:

  1. It is recommended to run your own private Registry to distribute Images
  2. It is recommended to scan these Images against known vulnerabilities.
… [Keep reading] “Static Security Analysis of Container Images with CoreOS Clair”

Google Cloud Platform: an entrée

13th of August, 2017 / / No Comments

The recent opening of a Google Cloud Platform region in Sydney about 2 months ago triggered my interest in learning more about the platform and understand how their offering would affect the local market moving forward.
So far, I have concentrated mainly on GCPs IaaS offering by digging information out of videos, documentation and venturing through the portal and Cloud Shell. I would like to share my first findings and highlight a few features that, in my opinion, make it worth having a closer look.… [Keep reading] “Google Cloud Platform: an entrée”

Making application configuration files dynamic with confd and Azure Redis

10th of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Service discovery and hot reconfiguration is a common problem we face in cloud development nowadays. In some cases we can rely on an orchestration engine like Kubernetes to do all the work for us. In other cases we can leverage a configuration management system and do the orchestration ourselves. However, there are still some cases where either of these solutions are impractical or just too complex for the immediate problem… and you don’t have a Consul cluster at hand either :(.… [Keep reading] “Making application configuration files dynamic with confd and Azure Redis”

Build from source and package into a minimal image with the new Docker Multi-Stage Build feature

5th of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Confd is a Golang written binary that can help us make configuration files dynamic. It achieves this by providing a templating engine that is driven by backend data stores like etcd, consul, dynamodb, redis, vault, zookeeper.

https://github.com/kelseyhightower/confd

A few days ago I started putting together a BYO load-balancing PoC where I wanted to use confd and Nginx. I realised however that some features that I needed from confd were not yet released. Not a problem; I was able to compile the master branch and package the resulting binary into an Nginx container all in one go, and without even having Golang installed on my machine.… [Keep reading] “Build from source and package into a minimal image with the new Docker Multi-Stage Build feature”