Thoughts from the clouds
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
I was recently confronted with the following problem: how can I run code from inside an Azure ARM Quickstart Template? Well, if you don’t know ARM Templates, they are essentially a declarative description of objects as you want to have them in Azure, but they don’t allow to run code as such. For example, see … Continue reading Run Azure Functions from your Quickstart ARM Templates
Number of cores and GHz is not the right way of expressing compute requirements for workloads
From my previous posts you have probably realized that I am a huge fan of infrastructure automation, since in my opinion it is the only way of operating efficiently a data center. In order to implement automation, you have two possibilities Use an automation software, either installed locally in your premises (such as Microsoft’s System … Continue reading Azure Functions for Infrastructure Automation (or how to run PowerShell from the cloud)
It is now about 100 days since I changed the direction of my career from the private to the public cloud, and it is time to do a small wrap up of the things I have learnt in these last few weeks, with which you might agree (or if you do not, please comment!). I … Continue reading My first 100 days at Microsoft: the end of the (IT) world as we know it
Do you remember when Cisco introduced UCS servers in 2009? One of the attributes of Cisco UCS that contributed to its huge success are service profiles: the possibility of describing the configuration and personlity of a server in a declarative language, and deploying it in multiple pieces of hardware. After a while, Cisco extended that concept … Continue reading If you like Cisco UCS or ACI, you are going to love Azure (Stack)
You might have read my previous blog on how important collaboration software can be for creating an effective DevOps culture. A couple of things have happened since I wrote that blog: Azure Functions make serverless computing possible in Azure Microsoft has launched Teams, more or less playing in the same category as Cisco Spark and … Continue reading Bringing together Dev and Ops with Serverless Computing (Azure Functions)
This is an exciting post, since it is the first one I write since I joined the Microsoft team. One of the things that have surprised me is the amount of open source solutions that you can deploy effortlessly in Azure. Services ranging from a simple RHEL or Ubunto machine, to complete open source solutions … Continue reading Using Ansible to Create and Manage Linux Workloads in Azure
Last three years have been the hell of a ride for me personally at Cisco. Ever since Cisco acquired Insieme, I had the privilege of working on this new approach for data center networking. In an extremely exciting moment in the network industry fueled by the SDN hype, it looked as if every network professional suddenly … Continue reading So long Cisco, hello Microsoft!
Cloudtrooper 