Microsoft Azure How to monitor Azure Reservations utilization Using Azure Reservations is one of many technics to optimize your cloud spend in Azure. They are a great option to reduce costs for Azure resources with a long lifespan and predictable utilization.
How To How to update the OAuth2 permission grants for an Azure AD service principal In this blog post, I will share some tips on how you can update the OAuth2 permission grants for an existing application in your tenant.
How To How to connect to Azure Database for MySQL from Ghost container Continuing the topic of hosting Ghost on Azure, I decided to document some nuances of connecting to Azure Database for MySQL from a Ghost Docker container hosted on Azure Web Apps for Containers.
Azure DevOps How to deploy to different tenants with Azure DevOps Although most organizations, especially with centralized IT management, prefer to build and operate their infrastructure within a single Azure AD tenant, there are still enough corner cases when you need to span your deployment process across multiple tenants.
Azure Policy How to deploy Azure Policy with Bicep It has been a while since I wrote about Azure Policy last time, plus recently there was a lot of hype around Bicep, so I decided to give it a try and shed some light on creating and deploying custom Azure policies with that new language.
Microsoft Azure Ghost deployment on Azure: Security Hardening In the first part of this series, I wrote about running Ghost on Azure Web App for Containers. Here we will explore some security improvements to the original deployment configuration, as I promised last time.
Azure Policy Azure Policy: Starter Guide My coworkers and teammates often reach out to me with similar questions regarding the best practices for creating and applying Azure Policy. That tendency encouraged me to compile this starter guide for Azure Policy, which is based on my practical experience in multiple projects.
Microsoft Azure Design the access management process for Azure resources Access management in Azure is a broad and complex topic consisting of many interconnected parts, including Azure Active Directory, the Role-based Access Control (RBAC) model, resource permissions, service-specific access configurations, and so on.
Microsoft Azure A one-click Ghost deployment on Azure Web App for Containers Even though I’m pretty satisfied with running my blog on a DigitalOcean droplet backed up with Cloudflare CDN, I spent some time last few months looking for an option to run Ghost on Azure.
CMDB Practical aspects of running a CMDB for Azure resources: Tips In the second part of this series, I would like to focus on the Azure-specific aspects of implementing a CMDB. It will be rather a collection of best practices than a prescriptive implementation guide.
CMDB Practical aspects of running a CMDB for Azure resources: Fundamentals Keeping track of your IT resources is not an easy task, especially in enterprise-scale environments with hundreds of business applications, thousands of services, and myriads of dependencies among all of them.
Book Review Notes on “Team Topologies” by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais (Book Review) This book can provide you with a fresh look at what might be of more importance than any existing methodology for an enterprise to succeed. Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais raise a few essential questions about the influence of Conway’s law on organizations’ performance and operational excellence.
Book Review Notes on “Army of None” by Paul Scharre (Book Review) “Army of None” by Paul Scharre was sitting in my Audible library for quite long so I decided to give it a try and was not disappointed.
Microsoft Azure Practical use cases of cost optimization in Azure Addressing the subject with traditional direct approaches of cost-cutting such as negotiating for discounts or moving to a cheaper service provider can help you to some extent. Still, your saving results might not be very impressive if comparing to cloud-native options.
Blogging On selling (and buying) DevOps Recently, I had a few interesting conversations with my fellow colleagues about marketing and selling DevOps expertise. After a lively thought exchange and hearing opinions from people with a different professional background, we had several distinct offering formats to evaluate.
Microsoft Azure A sample CI/CD pipeline for Azure Automation account Continuing the topic of automation, PowerShell, and Azure DevOps, in this blog post, I would like to share some ideas on implementing continuous deployment for Azure Automation accounts.
Book Review Notes on “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries (Book Review) Recently, I have finished listening to “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries, an engineer and entrepreneur. The book is full of descriptive examples from Eric’s own experience as well as from the product teams he consulted.
Postmortem How I failed the network configuration for my blog A few months ago, I registered an additional shorter domain name for my blog – matveychuk.com and was tweaking the DNS configuration so that users can access the site using both domains. In a while, something weird started happening…
How To How I run my blog Recently, I got a few questions from my friends and colleagues about my blog. Specifically, about its internals. Not to repeat myself, answering the same questions over and over, here I am going to share the technical details on that.
How To Signing your emails in Outlook with an S/MIME certificate and YubiKey Following my experience in signing commits with GPG, Git and YubiKey, I continued my experiments with cryptography and decided to set up a digital signature on my personal email. That is not something I need for work, and mostly I did it just for fun.
How To How to sign your commits with GPG, Git and YubiKey Last week I finally managed to get my hands on a YubiKey 5 NFC I ordered last Christmas and configured it to use for signing my commits on GitHub. By signing your commits, you can let other people know that the changes come from a trusted source if, of course, people trust your digital identity.
Blogging Challenges of remote work in the times of Corona Virus My own experience of working as a remote contractor for the last nine months proved to be very successful. However, as Scott Hanselman wrote recently, quarantine work is not remote work. Sadly, I tend to agree with his statement, and here is why.
Azure DevOps Boost your confidence with Azure DevOps (Webinar) Next week, on April 29, 2020, I will be doing a demo on the webinar hold by Infopulse, an outsourcing company that is a part of the TietoEVRY group. This webinar will be dedicated to using Azure DevOps services for achieving maximum business value in common and some specialized cases.
Azure DevOps How to access private PowerShell repository from Azure pipeline In my last post, I showed you how to use Azure Artifacts to host your PowerShell repository and publish your custom PowerShell modules to it. Here I would like to talk about accessing and using those modules by other Azure Pipelines.
PowerShell A sample CI/CD pipeline for PowerShell module Following my post on embracing DevOps practices in PowerShell automation, I decided to share a sample PowerShell module project with CI/CD pipeline that would put theory in practice.
