Putting SQL to REST with Azure Data Factory

27th of June, 2017 / / No Comments

Microsoft’s integration stack has slowly matured over the past years, and we’re on the verge of finally breaking away from BizTalk Server, or are we? In this article I’m going to explore Azure Data Factory (ADF). Rather than showing the usual out of the box demo I’m going to demonstrate a real-world scenario that I recently encountered at one of Kloud’s customers.
ADF is a very easy to use and cost-effective solution for simple integration scenarios that can be best described as ETL in the ‘old world’.… [Keep reading] “Putting SQL to REST with Azure Data Factory”

Kloud Managed Services team responds to the global (WannaCry) ransomware attack

17th of May, 2017 / / No Comments

It’s been a busy week for our Managed Services team, who have collaborated together across our globally distributed team to provide a customer first security response to this most recent ransomware attack.
From the outset our teams acted swiftly to ensure the several hundred servers, platforms & desktop infrastructure under our management were secure.
Based on our deep knowledge of our customers, their environments and landscapes Kloud Managed Services were able to swiftly develop individual security approaches to remediate discovered security weak points.… [Keep reading] “Kloud Managed Services team responds to the global (WannaCry) ransomware attack”

VPC ( Virtual Private Cloud) Configuration

15th of May, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

This blog is Part 01 of a 02 part series related to custom VPC configurations
Part 01 discusses the following scenario

  • Creating a VPC with 02 subnets ( Public and Private )
  • Creating a bastion host server in the public subnet
  • Allowing the Bastion host to connect to the servers in the Private Subnet using RDP.

Part 02 will discuss the following

  • Configuring NAT Instances
  • Configuring VPC Peering
  • Configuring VPC flow Logs.

What is a VPC

VPC can be described as a logical Datacenter where AWS resources can be deployed.… [Keep reading] “VPC ( Virtual Private Cloud) Configuration”

Patching EC2 through SSM

8th of May, 2017 / / 48 Comments

 

Why Patch Manager?

AWS SSM Patch Manager is an automated tool that helps you simplify your operating system patching process, including selecting the patches you want to deploy, the timing for patch roll-outs, controlling instance reboots, and many other tasks. You can define auto-approval rules for patches with an added ability to black-list or white-list specific patches, control how the patches are deployed on the target instances (e.g. stop services before applying the patch), and schedule the automatic roll out through maintenance windows.… [Keep reading] “Patching EC2 through SSM”

A Closer Look at Amazon Chime

28th of March, 2017 / / No Comments

In news this quarter AWS have released a web conferencing cloud service to their existing ‘Business Productivity‘ services which already includes Amazon WorkDocs and Amazon WorkMail. So my thought was to help you gauge where this sits in relation to Skype for Business. I don’t want to put this into a Microsoft versus Amazon review but I do want you to understand the product names that ‘somewhat’ align with each other.

Exchange = WorkMail

SharePoint/OneDrive for Business  =  WorkDocs

Skype for Business  = Chime

The Microsoft products are reasonably well known in the world so I’ll give you a quick one liner about the Amazons products:

WorkMail “Hosted Email”

WorkDocs “Hosted files accessible via web, PC, mobile devices with editing and sharing capability”

So what is Chime?

… [Keep reading] “A Closer Look at Amazon Chime”

UX Process: A groundwork for effective design teams

10th of February, 2017 / / No Comments

User Experience practice is about innovating and finding solutions to real-world problems. Which means we need to find problems, then validate them first before trying to fix them. So how do we go about doing all this? Read on…

I’ve been asked to explain a “Good UX Process” numerous times over the years in consulting. Customers want a formula per se that can solve all their design problems. But unfortunately, it doesn’t exist and there is no set UX process that applies to all.
… [Keep reading] “UX Process: A groundwork for effective design teams”

Back to Basics – Design Patterns – Part 2

9th of February, 2017 / / No Comments

In the previous post, we discussed design patterns, their structure and usage. Then we discussed the three fundamental types and started off with the first one – Creational Patterns.
Continuing with creational patterns we will now discuss Abstract Factory pattern, which is considered to be a super set of Factory Method.

Abstract Factory

In the Factory method, we discussed how it targets a single family of subclasses using a corresponding set of factory method classes, or a single factory method class via parametrised/ static factory method.… [Keep reading] “Back to Basics – Design Patterns – Part 2”

Back to Basics – Design Patterns – Part 1

7th of February, 2017 / / No Comments

Design Patterns

Design patterns are reusable solutions to recurring problems of software design and engineering in the real-world. Patterns makes it easier to reuse proven techniques to resolve design and architectural complications and then communicating and documenting them with better understanding, making them more accessible to developers in an abstract way.

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Design patterns enhance the classic techniques of object oriented programming by encouraging the reusability and communication of the solutions of common problems at abstract levels and improves the maintainability of the code as a by-product at implementation levels.… [Keep reading] “Back to Basics – Design Patterns – Part 1”