Azure Bastion’s current annoying limitation

28th of January, 2020 / / No Comments

Originally posted on here at https://lucian.blog. Follow Lucian on Twitter @lucianfrango.

Since this service stumbled on the open web by way of a leak in June 2019 and having used it for a while now in preview plus since its been GA- for me this seems to be the best way to conduct secure remote access to IaaS infrastructure in Azure.

The idea of not having to deploy any internet accessible infrastructure (not having to open up TCP22 or TCP3389) to the avalanche of 1337 h4x0rs trying to gain access to anything and everything on those ports is great news.

… [Keep reading] “Azure Bastion’s current annoying limitation”

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”

Office 365 URLs and IP address updates for firewall and proxy configuration, using Flow and Azure Automation

3rd of September, 2018 / / No Comments

tl;dr

To use Microsoft Office 365, an organisation must allow traffic to [and sometimes from] the respective cloud services via the internet on specific ports and protocols to various URLs and/or IP addresses, or if you meet the requirements via Azure ExpressRoute.… [Keep reading] “Office 365 URLs and IP address updates for firewall and proxy configuration, using Flow and Azure Automation”

Automate ADFS Farm Installation and Configuration

27th of September, 2016 / / No Comments

Originally posted on Nivlesh’s blog @ nivleshc.wordpress.com

Introduction

In this multi-part blog, I will be showing how to automatically install and configure a new ADFS Farm. We will accomplish this using Azure Resource Manager templates, Desired State Configuration scripts and Custom Script Extensions.

Overview

We will use Azure Resource Manager to create a virtual machine that will become our first ADFS Server. We will then use a desired state configuration script to join the virtual machine to our Active Directory domain and to install the ADFS role.… [Keep reading] “Automate ADFS Farm Installation and Configuration”

Active Directory – What are Linked Attributes?

26th of September, 2016 / / No Comments

A customer request to add some additional attributes to their Azure AD tenant via Directory Extensions feature in the Azure AD Connect tool, lead me into further investigation. My last blog here set out the customer request, but what I didn’t detail in that blog was one of the attributes they also wanted to extend into Azure AD was directReports, an attribute they had used in the past for their custom built on-premise applications to display the list of staff the user was a manager for.… [Keep reading] “Active Directory – What are Linked Attributes?”

Using Microsoft Azure Table Service REST API to collect data samples

9th of June, 2016 / / No Comments

Sometimes we need a simple solution that requires collecting data from multiple sources. The sources of data can be IoT devices or systems working on different platforms and in different places. Traditionally, integrators start thinking about implementation of a custom centralised REST API with some database repository. This solution can take days to implement and test, it is very expensive and requires hosting, maintenance, and support. However, in many cases, it is not needed at all.… [Keep reading] “Using Microsoft Azure Table Service REST API to collect data samples”

Moving SharePoint Online workflow task metadata into the data warehouse using Nintex Flows and custom Web API

23rd of April, 2016 / / No Comments

This post suggests the idea of automatic copying of SharePoint Online(SPO) workflow tasks’ metadata into the external data warehouse.  In this scenario, workflow tasks are becoming a subject of another workflow that performs automatic copying of task’s data into the external database using a custom Web API endpoint as the interface to that database. Commonly, the requirement to move workflow tasks data elsewhere arises from limitations of SPO. In particular, SPO throttles requests for access to workflow data making it virtually impossible to create a meaningful workflow reporting system with large amounts of workflow tasks.… [Keep reading] “Moving SharePoint Online workflow task metadata into the data warehouse using Nintex Flows and custom Web API”

Break down your templates with Linked Templates (Part 1)

16th of April, 2016 / / 3 Comments

Templated deployment is one of the key value propositions of moving from the Azure classic to Resource Manager (ARM) deployment model.  This is probably one key feature that made a big stride towards Infrastructure as a Code (IAC).  Personally, I have been looking forward to this feature since it’s a prominent feature on the other competing platform.

Now that this feature is live for a while, one aspect which I found interesting is the ability to link templates in Azure Resource Manager. … [Keep reading] “Break down your templates with Linked Templates (Part 1)”

Simultaneously Start|Stop all Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines in a Resource Group

10th of February, 2016 / / 13 Comments

Problem

How many times have you wanted to Start or Stop all Virtual Machines in an Azure Resource Group ? For me it seems to be quite often, especially for development environment resource groups. It’s not that difficult though. You can just enumerate the VM’s then cycle through them and call ‘Start-AzureRMVM’ or ‘Start-AzureRMVM’. However, the more VM’s you have, that approach running serially as PowerShell does means it can take quite some time to complete.… [Keep reading] “Simultaneously Start|Stop all Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines in a Resource Group”

Azure ExpressRoute in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange

1st of July, 2015 / / 4 Comments

Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute provides dedicated, private circuits between your WAN or datacentre and private networks you build in the Microsoft Azure public cloud. There are two types of ExpressRoute connections – Network (NSP) based and Exchange (IXP) based with each allowing us to extend our infrastructure by providing connectivity that is:

  • Private: the circuit is isolated using industry-standard VLANs – the traffic never traverses the public Internet when connecting to Azure VNETs and, when using the public peer, even Azure services with public endpoints such as Storage and Azure SQL Database.
… [Keep reading] “Azure ExpressRoute in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange”