Well, big news here! Due to a career change, I am saying goodbye to Azure for a while. I wish I had blogged more about Azure, as I am fond of the platform. At the same time, I'm excited to switch gears and learn AWS/GCP.
Azure Storage pricing
Prior to using cloud, someone once told me: there is no charge for transferring data in to Cloud, but you are charged for taking it back out. This is of course... not true. When you are experimenting with Azure Storage in a learning environment, perhaps copying a few large'ish media files up to a storage …
Terraform – Concat + formatlist multiple lists
An issue I ran in to recently was that I needed to assign multiple lists to the ip_rules block of an Azure Key Vault in Terraform. Doing so was easy enough using Terraform's concat function. Initially, the use case was simple... combine three lists that were stored as variables. ip_rules = "${concat(var.list1, var.list2, var.list3)}" I …
Continue reading "Terraform – Concat + formatlist multiple lists"
Azure Linux VM “Update agent readiness” suddenly Not Ready.
A little Linux VM I had deployed several months back suddenly quit taking automatic updates. The VM was connected to the proper workspace and was showing as "connected" to that workspace; however, Update management was showing no information in regards to the status of missing updates and the agent readiness was showing as "Not ready". …
Continue reading "Azure Linux VM “Update agent readiness” suddenly Not Ready."
Attaching volumes greater than 2TB to an Azure Linux VM
These days it is fairly common that I need to store and process large volumes of data. This isn't possible with fdisk; you'll need to turn to something like parted if you want to create a volume larger than 2 terabytes. Here's how... This does not have to be an Azure Linux VM of course... …
Continue reading "Attaching volumes greater than 2TB to an Azure Linux VM"
An example of Azure <-> Azure PaaS resource network routing “never leaving the backbone” and how it impacts Security.
There are a few relatively decent sources of documentation for Azure Networking available, but generally they center around VNET-based scenarios. If you're trying to stay strictly on PaaS offerings, things tend to not be quite as clear. The lack of information makes sense in a way... why do you need to know anything about Azure-to-Azure …
Change Azure Key Vault sku from Standard to Premium
If you've deployed a vault with the Standard sku and would like to update it to Premium, it currently isn't possible to do so using the portal. Although CI/CD tools support setting the sku at creation time, some of them don't handle changing the sku. For example, Terraform plan will notify you that the sku …
Continue reading "Change Azure Key Vault sku from Standard to Premium"
MSFT has published Windows Virtual Desktop IP Address ranges
Alright! Over the last couple of months I have been using the Windows Virtual Desktop platform heavily. Unfortunately, determining the IP address ranges of the platform has involved a fair amount of traffic log review, something that isn't overly exciting. What is exciting is that MSFT is now including the ranges in the Azure IP …
Continue reading "MSFT has published Windows Virtual Desktop IP Address ranges"
Using Azure Key Vault in ASP.NET Core
In a previous post I described what Azure Key Vault is and provided some instruction in regards to setting it up and using it. Now we're going to run through some code examples to see how an application can use a vault. There is no reason to re-create Microsoft's excellent documentation that demonstrates an ASP.NET …
Azure Key Vault
The need to store sensitive information securely in Cloud environments is both hugely important and challenging. Azure Key Vault can help. Imagine a simple scenario where you are part of a team developing a Cloud-native application. The application needs to access an Azure SQL Database and an Azure Storage account. You should avoid hard-coding your …