Message retry patterns in Azure Functions

22nd of May, 2017 / / 3 Comments

Azure Functions provide ServiceBus based trigger bindings that allow us to process messages dropped onto a SB queue or delivered to a SB subscription. In this post we’ll walk through creating an Azure Function using a ServiceBus trigger that implements a configurable message retry pattern.
Note: This post is not an introduction to Azure Functions nor an introduction to ServiceBus. For those not familiar will these Azure services take a look at the Azure Documentation Centre.… [Keep reading] “Message retry patterns in Azure Functions”

Know Your Cloud Resource Costs on Azure

5th of May, 2017 / / No Comments

An organisation used to invest their IT infrastructure mostly for computers, network or data centre. Over time, they spent their budget for hosting spaces. Nowadays, in cloud environments, they mostly spend their funds to purchase computing power. Here’s a simple diagram about the cloud computing evolution. From left to right, expenditure shifts from infrastructure to computing power.

In the cloud environment, when we need resources, we just create and use them, and when we don’t need them any longer, we just delete them.… [Keep reading] “Know Your Cloud Resource Costs on Azure”

Getting Azure 99.95% SLA for Cisco FTD virtual appliances in Azure via availability sets and ARM templates

20th of April, 2017 / / No Comments

First published on Lucian’s blog at Lucian.Blog. Follow Lucian on Twitter: @LucianFrango or connect via LinkedIn: Lucian Franghiu.

In the real world there are numerous lessons learned, experiences, opinions and vendors recommendations that dictate and what constitutes “best practice” when it comes to internet edge security. It’s a can of worms that I don’t want to open as I am not claiming to be an expert in that regard. I can say that I do have enough experience to know that not having any security is a really bad idea and having bank level security for regular enterprise customers can be excessive.… [Keep reading] “Getting Azure 99.95% SLA for Cisco FTD virtual appliances in Azure via availability sets and ARM templates”

Migrating VirtualBox VDI Virtual Machines to Azure

5th of April, 2017 / / 4 Comments

Overview

Over the years I’ve transitioned through a number of laptops and for whatever reason they never fully get put out to pasture. Two specific laptops are used semi-regularly for functions associated with a few virtual machines they hold. Over the last 10 years or so, I’ve been a big proponent of VirtualBox. It’s footprint and functionality aligned with my needs. The downside these days is needing to sometimes carry two laptops just to use an application or two contained inside a Virtual Machine on VirtualBox.… [Keep reading] “Migrating VirtualBox VDI Virtual Machines to Azure”

Send mail to Office 365 via an Exchange Server hosted in Azure

24th of February, 2017 / / No Comments

Those of you who have attempted to send mail to Office 365 from Azure know that sending outbound mail directly from an email server hosted in Azure is not supported due to elastic nature of public cloud service IPs and the potential for abuse. Therefore, the Azure IP address blocks are added to public block lists with no exceptions to this policy.
To be able to send mail from an Azure hosted email server to Office 365 you to need to send mail via a SMTP relay.… [Keep reading] “Send mail to Office 365 via an Exchange Server hosted in Azure”

Exchange Server 2016 in Azure

23rd of February, 2017 / / 13 Comments

I recently worked on a project where I had to install Exchange Server 2016 on an Azure VM and I chose a D2 sized Azure VM (2 cores, 7GB RAM) thinking that will suffice, well that was a big mistake.
The installation made it to the last step before a warning appeared informing me that the server is low on memory resources and eventually terminated the installation, leaving it incomplete.
Let this be a warning to the rest of you, choose a D3 or above sized Azure VM to save yourself a whole lot of agony.… [Keep reading] “Exchange Server 2016 in Azure”

Exchange Server 2016 install error: “Active Directory could not be contacted”

23rd of February, 2017 / / No Comments

I recently worked on a project where I had to install Exchange Server 2016 on an Azure VM and received error “Active Directory could not be contacted”.
To resolve the issue, I had to complete the following steps;

  1. Remove the Azure VM public IP address
  2. Disable IPv6 on the NICipv6-disabled
  3. Set the IPv4 DNS suffix to point to your domain. If a public address is being used it will be set to reddog.microsoft.com by default.dns-suffix

Once done the installation could proceed and Active Directory was contactable.

A [brief] intro to Azure Resource Visualiser (ARMVIZ.io)

21st of February, 2017 / / No Comments

Another week, another Azure tool that I’ve come by and thought I’d share with the masses. Though this one isn’t a major revelation or a something that I’ve added to my Chrome work profile bookmarks bar like I did with the Azure Resource Explorer (as yet, though, I may well add this in the very near future), I certainly have it bookmarked in my Azure folder in Chrome bookmarks.

When working with Azure Resource Manager templates, you’re dealing with long JSON files.… [Keep reading] “A [brief] intro to Azure Resource Visualiser (ARMVIZ.io)”

Why are you not using Azure Resource Explorer (Preview)?

17th of February, 2017 / / 1 Comment

For almost two years the Azure Resource Explorer has been in preview. For almost two years barely anyone has used it. This stops today!

I’ve been playing around with the Azure Portal (ARM) and clicking away stumbled upon the Azure Resource Explorer; available via https://resources.azure.com. Before you go any further, click on that or open the URI in a new tab in your favourite browser (I’m using Chrome 56.x for Mac if you were wondering) and finally BOOKMARK IT!… [Keep reading] “Why are you not using Azure Resource Explorer (Preview)?”

How to configure a Graphical PowerShell Dev/Admin/Support User Interface for Azure/Office365/Microsoft Identity Manager

16th of January, 2017 / / No Comments

During the development of an identity management solution I find myself with multiple PowerShell/RDP sessions connected to multiple environments using different credentials often to obtain trivial data/information. It is easy to trip yourself up as well with remote powershell sessions to differing environments. If only there was a simple UI that could front-end a set of PowerShell modules and make those simple queries quick and painless. Likewise to allow support staff to execute a canned set of queries without providing them elevated permissions.… [Keep reading] “How to configure a Graphical PowerShell Dev/Admin/Support User Interface for Azure/Office365/Microsoft Identity Manager”