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.
What a surprise in my inbox today! I am now an #AzureHero because I was nominated by a colleague of mine! I was obviously selected to to be one of 550 community heroes that get this badge. Not so sure about the value, but the good thing is that I finally learn a little bit about Blockchain technologies. Why? Microsoft joined forces with Enjin to build this Blockchain-based recognition program using Ethereum.
You can get more information about the program here or just follow all #AzureHeroes on Twitter!
Cheers,
Marcel
The new year slowly started and I am already totally absorbed with customer projects, community activities and some private side projects. Time to quickly announce my H1 2020 conferences & events schedule.
Microsoft Ignite is Microsoft’s annual conference that runs in the United States. I was happy to be accepted as a speaker at Ignite 2019 and had a great time presenting, networking and learning. Beside this conference with more than 25k attendees, Microsoft runs 30 “Microsoft Ignite The Tour” stops across the globe. I am happy to have been accepted for two stops I applied for.
Whenever I am involved in organizing a conference, I write a “This was …” article. This November we again ran our annual conference “Experts Live Europe” in Prague. We had a great time spending some days with the European Microsoft community!
