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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PowerShell How to roll out Microsoft Monitoring Agent with PowerShell DSC I already wrote a pretty informative article about using PowerShell DSC for configuring Azure DevOps build servers, and here I would like to share a solution for a more common task – onboarding your servers for monitoring with Azure Monitor.
Microsoft Azure How to deploy Azure Policy from an Azure DevOps pipeline After publishing my posts about deploying Azure Policy and Azure Policy initiatives from ARM templates, I got a few questions about performing such deployments from Azure DevOps pipelines. Indeed, there are a few things to pay attention to. So, I will try to shed some light on them in this article.
Microsoft Azure How to ensure proper configuration for your Azure resources A common task for Azure administrators is to ensure that resources in their Azure subscriptions are configured accordingly to some business requirements or standards’ regulations. So, how to accomplish this in practice?
Microsoft Azure Automatic tagging for Azure resources To tag or not to tag, that is out of the question. The question is how to apply tags to Azure resources only when needed and do that efficiently.
Microsoft Azure How to deploy linked ARM templates from private Azure DevOps repositories You probably already know that Azure Resource Manager should be able to access linked ARM templates via provided URI during the deployment of the master template. You cannot use local files. So, how to deploy linked ARM templates from a private repo?
Microsoft Azure How to enforce naming convention for Azure resources At some point, an organization might end up with Azure subscriptions that contain a bunch of resources named in a completely different manner. To bring some order in this mess, people usually try to come up with a naming convention to ensure a standard user experience across the teams.
Microsoft Azure Using ARM templates to deploy Azure Policy initiatives Instead of maintaining lots of separate files for Azure Policy you can put all the artifacts in an ARM template. Moreover, you can do the same for policy initiatives.
Microsoft Azure How to deploy Azure Policies with ARM templates Recently, I was working on creating custom Azure Policies and felt puzzled about how to create an efficient deployment process for them. All official examples referenced using separate files for policy parameters and rules plus additional input parameters to Azure PowerShell cmdlets.
Microsoft Azure Maintenance mode for web availability tests in Application Insights Many teams that host applications in Azure App Service setup the availability monitoring for their apps using Application Insights web tests. Also, it is a common practice to put an application into the maintenance mode before applying any changes, so as not to be wakened up at 2 am in the morning.
Microsoft Azure How to run Azure DevOps self-hosted agents effectively The installation of tools and libraries on build servers is generally performed by developers manually and only during the initial server setup. Some time later, you can find yourself with a bunch of build servers that have different versions of software installed on them.
System Design Why 99.99% uptime or SLA is bad How do you understand uptime / SLA? Do you know what it means for your system? How much are you willing to pay? How much money will you lose each hour your system is down? What is a reasonable uptime? Let's try to answer these questions.
