July 1 is an important day for the worldwide Microsoft community. On that day, Microsoft awards new and renews existing Microsoft MVPs. I am more than happy to have been renewed for another year in the “Microsoft Azure” category.
Deploying services in Azure is as simple as going to the marketplace and filling out a form. And boom, a new service or resource is up and running. This is great because it saves time and makes services accessible to us in very little time. However, there is a big downside with this simple approach that lots of companies do not keep in mind – and might hit them hard later.
Two weeks ago I received a nice confirmation email from Microsoft and finally I am allowed to share the news: My nomination for becoming a Microsoft Regional Director for Switzerland has been approved! That said, I am again part of a privileged group of approx. 160 people from around the globe that closely works with Microsoft to drive business and community engagements.
Azure Security Center (ASC) is your main stop when you need a first broad overview of your environment’s security posture. If there is potential to improve your overall security, ASC will give you recommendations that explain how a specific resource can be better protected. In addition to that, you can use advanced security features that assist you to detect and protect against threats. Those features bring additional intelligence to the show (think of machine learning) and help you make easier decisions to drive security to the next level.
I was asked recently if it is possible to use symbols when assigning names to Azure objects. The short answer is ‘yes’, this is indeed possible, but definitely not something I would recommend in a business environment. However, it makes things look nice, shiny and less boring and might be of use to drive attention in workshops, demos etc.
My last post about Azure Front Door went through the roof, so I though to deliver some more content about this topic. In this post I will focus on how Azure Front Doors can be deployed and managed using the Azure CLI. This will also unveil some new secrets about the service that are important to understand before you start managing it in a production environment.
If you are working with Azure and especially IaaS, you might know that designing and building a virtual network can become a challenge. Lots of differents parts must work together to have a secure, fast and solid network and routing infrastructure for your services – in Azure and for hybrid connectivity. If you have multiple offices you want to connect, it gets even more complex. But thanks to Azure Virtual WAN, this might be easier than you think!
During my work with customers I discovered that Azure Front Door is a not-so-well known service. However, it is very valuable if you run applications that are not only distributed across multiple regions, but also used by consumers across the globe. This article takes you through the (more or less) full Front Door journey and explains how to set it up for a (very simple) globally distributed web application.
When consuming cloud services, customers benefit from the pay-what-you-use billing model. That means that you only pay what you have provisioned and use. If you delete a resource, you will not pay for it anymore. This gives customers very good flexbility and cost control. However, what if you know that you will have some workloads such as virtual machines running in Azure for a long time? For those cases you can reserve capacity for one or three years upfront and get a financial discount. In Azure this is called ‘Reservations’. Many people know that reservations exist in Azure, but only few actually ever configured and used them. This walkthrough gives you some insights.
If you work with Azure you probably heard of Azure Policy. It’s a key component for governing your infrastructure and services to audit and enforce proper compliance. Azure policy can not only be used to audit and govern Azure resources, it also extends to Windows and Linux servers that run on Azure or somewhere else. In this post I will look a little behind the curtain of Azure Policy Guest Configurations for servers.
