Defining your cloud computing infrastructure as code (IAC) is becoming an industry standard for enterprise IT teams to scale effectively as their development teams and applications grow. Terraform, by Hashicorp, is an infrastructure as code tool that lets you define both cloud and on-prem resources using human-readable configuration files that you can version, reuse, and share across your various projects and development teams. This post will focus on several methods and patterns to make the most out of your terraform […]
In today’s digital world, passwords have become a universal language to access applications and devices. Now, many organizations are looking to employ a password-less strategy. As I wrote in a previous blog about protecting the user identity and data with Zero Trust and Microsoft Security, let us start with the basics and realize the number one asset under attack: the identity. Today, as organizations continue to plan and strategize the adoption of multi-factor authentication, users continue to authenticate with one-factor authentication […]
There are times when you must correlate different log sources within a centralized Azure Log Analytics Workspace to have a single management point for leveraging the robust suite of tooling available within Azure that provides visualizations (Dashboards / Workbooks) and action and mitigation capabilities (Alerts / Automation). If you have resources spanning multiple tenants, Azure lighthouse is used to delegate access to these resources to collect these logs. However, Azure lighthouse has its limitations. One that we recently encountered with […]
Recently, I was involved in a project where we had requirements. A report needed to be built based on data from several sources, including Azure Cosmos DB and Azure SQL. This report was required to be stored in Azure, and data was subject to a retention policy where it would be unable to be deleted. For this use case, we decided to use Azure Data Factory to read the data, transform the data, and load the data into a CSV […]
Automating the build and deployment of an Angular application in the Azure DevOps (AzDO) ecosystem is as easy as any other code hosting service. AzDO has added task types to help deploy directly to Azure subscriptions. In this post, we will look at creating a build pipeline with caching, discuss deploying to Azure App Service, and pushing a container to the Azure Container Registry for use in AKS. Building the Pipeline AzDO does have a GUI to help set up […]
As part of one of my projects, I was asked to research methods of transferring large amounts of data (> 1 Terabyte) between client-owned S3 buckets. Several suitable techniques are available. They include: Running parallel uploads using the AWS command-line interface (CLI) Using an AWS SDK (Source Development Kit) Using cross-region or same-region replication Using S3 batch operations Using S3DistCp with Amazon EMR Using AWS DataSync Some of these methods, such as copying files and directories using the AWS CLI […]
Can The Power Automate Process Advisor Be Used as a Time Study Tool? Microsoft has given us many tools over the years with multiple applications. The Process Advisor, now available in commercial, GCC, GCC High, and DoD environments, is simple enough to understand and use but has many potential applications. What is the Process Advisor? The Process Advisor is a tool included within Power Automate. It is used to record mouse clicks and keyboard keystrokes during a process. After recording […]
We know most software applications, desktop, mobile, or web, require a database at the backend to store data. When we look at current software applications, the complexity is very high, and they have a high frequency of data transactions. So, we need testing of the data stored and retrieved from the database to make sure it has proper data integrity. Any database operation performed by the application is always one of the four, Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete. We were […]
While recently working on moving an FTP server (using Passive FTP) from on-premises to Azure, I needed to expose the FTP server to the internet via an Azure External Load Balancer. A few things were not well documented. I thought it would be good to put together a step-by-step guide on setting up the load balancer, configuring the FTP server on the backend, and setting the Network Security Group rules associated with the FTP server. In this example, the FTP […]
In a previous article, we explored using the CSI Secrets Store Driver and Azure Provider to mount an HTTPS certificate stored in Azure Key Vault on pods deployed to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This was done using Linux containers and an ASP.NET Core application. But what about .NET Framework applications on Windows containers? Let’s see if we can take the same approach. About Windows Containers Containers initially grew out of the Linux world based on its natural support for container […]