Thoughts from the clouds
Having a good health check mechanism in your load balancer is critical. If your load balancer is not able to recognize when servers are not able to process client requests, that will result in a poor customer experience. For example, imagine if you just ping your web servers to check their availability, but the Web … Continue reading Better health checks with Azure LB and HTTP probes (example with PHP)
I have been updating my ARM templates to create VMs and VM Scale Sets (VMSS) to support the new Availability Zones. I have learnt some important concepts that were not obvious for me along the way, and I would like to share them. Before going forward, you can see a template where you can deploy … Continue reading Migrating your ARM templates to Azure Availability Zones
If you are wondering what HNV stands for, you are exactly right in this blog. HNV, or Hyper-V Network Virtualization is how Microsoft used to call their virtual networking stack in Windows Server. Nowadays it is usually referred to as Windows Server SDN, or more accurately Windows Server SDN v2 (“v2” meaning the newer implementation … Continue reading Best Kept Secret in the SDN Industry: HNV
Lateral movements are typically the first thing that hackers do after compromising a system in order to spread their attack to other valuable targets, so isolating systems that have been compromised is of paramount importance for an organization from a security perspective. In a previous blog (here) we saw a possibility of having abstract policies … Continue reading Easily isolate compromised VMs with Azure Security Center and Logic Apps
After reading the title above, you might be wondering why the heck you would want to do such a thing. The reason in my particular case is to connect an Azure Stack installation to an Azure ExpressRoute circuit, since Azure Stack needs some kind of connectivity to Azure. Azure Stack uses internally BGP and /31 … Continue reading Setting up /31 interfaces and BGP on a CentOS machine
Find out how to build a solution on top of Azure APIs to automate the creation of NSGs.
As you are probably aware of, DNS is one of the services offered in Azure (you can read more about it here, pricing here). And as you probably know as well, you can programatically manage Azure resources over many different ways. During the weekend it struck me that I could migrate the dynamic DNS solution … Continue reading Dynamic DNS with Azure DNS (and a bash script)
You are probably a Microsoft CSP partner if you are reading this, so you most likely already know that it stands for Cloud Solutions Provider. And you probably know too that you can interact with it over the Partner Center GUI, or through the Partner Center APIs. Have you automated the deployment of customers, their … Continue reading Using Python with the CSP API to automate customer onboarding
You have probably heard about Azure Backup (if you haven’t, check the documentation here). And you probably know that it is one of the most popular entry doors into the public cloud, since it offers cheap, simple, scalable, and unlimited storage for on-premises workloads (as well as for Azure VMs, of course). The use case … Continue reading Verifying Azure Backup for on-premises machines with Powershell
If you are reading this post, you might already know what CSP stands for: Cloud Solution Provider, it is the preferred selling model for Microsoft partners today when dealing with Azure. The authentication model in CSP has essentially two levels: you have CSP-level users, typically employees working for the Cloud Solution Provider itself, and you … Continue reading Automation with Azure CSP – CSP and ARM APIs authentication
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