I’m late to the game on this, but I think it’s worth writing a bit about the new Managed Disks service in Azure. For years, Amazon has had elastic Block Store (EBS). EBS is a storage system dedicated to providing block storage volumes to VMs running in EC2. This made it simple to create an … [Read more…]
Most organizations have secrets, such as private keys and passwords that need to be protected. Many organizations (rightly) are very sensitive to where the secrets are stored, and how they are used. On premises, it’s possible to simply store the keys on a USB drive in a safe, for example, but for larger organizations this … [Read more…]
Azure is a great platform. Users have access to a very broad range of hardware and services that can enable IT to transform how the business operates. However, sometimes there’s just too much choice, and administrators need to restrict the ability of contributors to deploy or use certain features. The obvious restriction is limiting VM size – not many organizations have a use for the very large instances, such as the … [Read more…]
Wow! I’ve been quite busy the last few weeks and I missed posting. This is no good… especially with all the new stuff announced this week! There’s sometimes lulls in new stuff (at least, that I care about), but this week has been full of cool and exicting features Native VMWare Backup with Azure Backup … [Read more…]
As organizations increasingly move data and services to Azure, it can be difficult to assess whether the services are implemented in a secure fashion. Many of the traditional datacenter security good practices apply in Azure, but they don’t necessarily translate in an obvious way. Moreover, with the ease with which an administrator can add resources, … [Read more…]
I spend a lot of my time at work introducing clients to Azure. There’s a lot to learn and understand about Azure – and the cloud computing paradigm in general. I’m often asked questions like: “Where do you learn about Azure?” “Where did you get started with Azure?” “How can I learn about Azure?” “What … [Read more…]
In the last couple weeks, some very welcome updates came to the Azure portal. There’s lots of little changes to the verbiage throughout, such as updating the “Browse” button to “More Services” – I bet the documentation team is going to be updating that for quite some time now. Two of the changes have really … [Read more…]
It’s been far too long since I’ve posted. I have about 10 posts in draft format, but there’s just too little time to work on them when the weather is beautiful. Summer is too short in Ontario… This is just a quick guide for upgrading WordPress on Project Nami. As I wrote in my first … [Read more…]
Continuing my previous post on Application Modernization, here I talk about some approaches that work, and some that don’t. tl;dr: Take your time moving to the cloud, and take the time to split the migration into stages – so that you can start taking advantage of the cloud using fairly simple architecture, then, as you … [Read more…]
A significant portion of my time working in Azure is spent working with clients who are planning on moving, are moving, or have moved existing applications to the cloud. This, of course, makes sense – it’s nice to imagine a world in which new business applications can be rebuilt on a regular basis, but in … [Read more…]