0.09 ms latency using Azure Proximity Placement Groups

14th of January, 2020 / / 2 Comments

Reducing network latency for critical apps running on Azure IaaS has become easier since Microsoft’s announcement of General Availability for Proximity Placement Groups (PPG) on Dec 2019.

Today I’ll give you a quick intro to Proximity Placement Groups demonstrating how to deploy a test environment into your Azure Subscription using one of my favourite tools AzureCLI. I’ll also test network latency with a PPG and without to show you the difference.

If you’re undecided about using AzureCLI or ARM templates for your Azure deployments have a look @ Pascal Naber’s post https://pascalnaber.wordpress.com/2018/11/11/stop-using-arm-templates-use-the-azure-cli-instead/

… [Keep reading] “0.09 ms latency using Azure Proximity Placement Groups”

AWS Organizations, How do I get Started?

27th of November, 2018 / / No Comments

Overview

In the previous blog post (see here) we took a look at AWS Organizations, what it is, what it’s comprised of and the benefits of a multi-account strategy. In this post we will take a look at how to get started with AWS Organizations by looking at a couple of ways we might want to design our Organization Unit’s hierarchy and go through the process of setting up our First OU’s and AWS Accounts. In a future blog post we will look at how we can implement an AWS Account Vending Machine to automate this process and ensure consistency across future accounts.… [Keep reading] “AWS Organizations, How do I get Started?”

The Present [and Future] Landscape of Data Migrations

17th of August, 2018 / / 1 Comment

A rite of passage for the majority of us in the tech consultancy world is being a part of a medium to large scale data migration at some stage in our careers. No, I don’t mean dragging files from a PC to a USB drive, though this may have very well factored into the equation for some us. What I’m referencing is a planned piece of work where the objective is to move an entire data set from a legacy storage system to a target storage.… [Keep reading] “The Present [and Future] Landscape of Data Migrations”

IaaS – Application Migration Management Tracker

11th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

What is IaaS Application Migration

Application migration is the process of moving an application program or set of applications from one environment to another. This includes migration from an on-premises enterprise server to a cloud provider’s environment or from one cloud environment to another. In this example, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) application migration.

Application Migration Management Tracker

Having a visual IaaS application migration tracker, helps to clearly identify all dependencies and blockers to manage your end to end migration tracking.… [Keep reading] “IaaS – Application Migration Management Tracker”

Proactive Problem Management – Benefits and Considerations

17th of May, 2018 / / No Comments

IT Service Management – Proactive Problem Management

The goal of Proactive Problem Management is to prevent Incidents by identifying weaknesses in the IT infrastructure and applications, before any issues have been instigated.

Benefits

PPM.jpg

  • Greater system stability – This leads to increased user satisfaction.
  • Increased user productivity – This adds to a sizable productivity gain across the enterprise.
  • Positive customer feedback – When we proactively approach users who have been experiencing issues and offer to fix their problems the feedback will be positive.
… [Keep reading] “Proactive Problem Management – Benefits and Considerations”

Azure AD Domain Services

4th of December, 2017 / / No Comments

I recently had what I thought was a rather unique requirement from a customer.
The requirement was to build Azure IaaS virtual machines and have them joined to a managed domain, while also being able to authenticate to the virtual machines using Azure AD credentials.
The answer is Azure AD Domain Services!
Azure AD Domain Services provides managed domain services such as domain join, group policy and Kerberos/NTLM authentication without the need for you to deploy and  manage domain controllers in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Azure AD Domain Services”

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”

Decommissioning Exchange 2016 Server

26th of June, 2017 / / 2 Comments

I have created many labs over the years and never really spent the time to decommission my environment, I usually just blow it away and start again.
So I finally decided to go through the process and decommission my Exchange 2016 server in my lab environment.
My lab consisted of the following:

  • Domain Controller (Windows Server 2012 R2)
  • AAD Connect Server
  • Exchange 2016 Server/ Office 365 Hybrid
  • Office 365 tenant

Being a lab I only had one Exchange server which had the mailbox role configured and was also my hybrid server.… [Keep reading] “Decommissioning Exchange 2016 Server”

Akamai Cloud based DNS Black Magic

1st of May, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Let us start with traditional DNS hosting with any DNS hoster or ISP. How does traditional DNS name resolution works? When you type a human readable name www.anydomain.com on the address bar of internet explorer, that name is resolved to an Internet Protocol (IP) address hosted by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The browser presented the website to the user. By doing so, the website exposed the public IP address to everyone. The good and bad guys know the IP address and can trace globally.… [Keep reading] “Akamai Cloud based DNS Black Magic”

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”