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Adding a Windows Firewall rule using PowerShell
PowerShell is an amazing technology which I’d love to learn to use properly some day. Unfortunately I’m still at the stage where I don’t really know much about it, but from time to time I need to use...
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Automated Build and Deployment with Windows Azure SDK 1.6
A few months ago I posted on how to automate deployment of Windows Azure projects using MSBuild. While the approach documented in that post continues to work, Windows Azure SDK 1.6 has introduced some...
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Deploying multiple virtual directories to a single Azure Website
Since the beginning of time, IIS has allowed you to configure multiple virtual directories and applications within a single website. There are a bunch of situations where this is useful, but let’s go...
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A/B Testing with Azure Websites
In the context of websites, A/B testing, or Testing In Production, is a technique whereby different users of a website will be randomly presented with different versions of the site. This is commonly...
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Unattended authentication to Azure Management APIs with Azure Active Directory
Updated 29/11/2014 with info on authenticating to APIs from PowerShell Microsoft Azure provides two management APIs, the older Service Management API and the new Azure Resource Manager API. Both are...
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Applying some DevOps Rigour to Azure Websites’ AppSettings
Summary: Configuring Azure Websites Application Settings in the portal is fine for quick and dirty prototypes, but for anything serious you need to apply some DevOps rigour. This post describes how you...
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Applying a “Web and Worker Roles” pattern to the Azure App Service
Summary: A common use for Azure Cloud Services is to implement services that utilise a “web and worker role” pattern to offload complex processing to async workers. This article describes how you can...
View ArticleChanging the server time zone on Azure Web Apps
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably learned that it’s a bad idea for your applications to take a dependency on the time zone configured on your servers, as it makes your code less portable and...
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Azure QuickStarts: In Visual Studio and on the web
Whether you are a beginner or an experienced developer, learning a brand new API can be challenging. Comprehensive documentation is obviously important, but sometimes that can make the new API seem...
View ArticleSo, you want to build a cloud service?
Great! Now, you probably have a million questions on which cloud provider, technologies and patterns you should use. And while those questions are important, in this post I want to go through a few...
View ArticleAuthenticating to Azure Resource Manager using AAD and Certificates
In a previous post I described how to perform unattended authentication to Azure Active Directory using a username and password. This post takes this further by showing how to use certificates, rather...
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Analysing Enterprise Azure spend by Tags
Azure Resource Manager allows you to assign custom “tags” to resources such as VMs or storage accounts. This allows you to put custom metadata onto your resources, such as which application it belongs...
View ArticleMigrating Azure IaaS solutions from ASM to ARM using MigAz
Anyone who has previously deployed Azure IaaS solutions using the older Azure Service Management (ASM) model should be thinking about how and when to migrate it to Azure Resouce Manager (ARM). While...
View ArticleExporting details of Azure Virtual Machines to CSV/Excel
In my current role as a Cloud Solution Architect, I’m often asked to take a look at a customer’s existing Azure environments and provide advice on how they can be improved. The first step is always to...
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Industrial Scale RBAC in Microsoft Azure
If you're building a cloud service with just a few of your closest friends, you can forgiven for not thinking about securing your resources—allowing everyone in the team to do anything to all resources...
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Industrial Scale Onboarding in Microsoft Azure
In my last post on Industrial Scale RBAC, I alluded to the fact that in an enterprise context you'll likely need some special processes and tools for onboarding new projects into Azure. In this post,...
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Get Alerts as you approach your Azure resource quotas
Updated 16/06/2107 to also return Network usage Each Azure subscription has a bunch of limits and quotas. Most of these are "soft" limits, meaning that they can be raised on your request--the limits...
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Detecting drift between ARM templates and Azure resource groups
In DevOps Utopia, all of your Azure resources are deployed from ARM templates using a Continuous Deployment tool. The ARM templates and parameters files are all stored in source control, so you can go...
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