It turns out that warning on the Microsoft Docs site about Azure Firewall blocking port 25 for certain subscription types - yes, that’s important! I recently faced a scenario where there was a need to support in the migration from Azure EA to Azure CSP billing models - a fairly simple and seamless experience if … Continue reading Port 25 & Azure Firewall
Managing your Azure environment as it grows
So, you have your subscriptions and your resources are neatly bundled together within resource groups but now, as you're growing you find yourself having to repeat the configuration of you IAM, Security Centre policies and compliance as the number of subscriptions etc. is increased. Microsoft has thought of this and introduced Management groups a while … Continue reading Managing your Azure environment as it grows
Azure Sentinel goes GA
As always happens this time of year, with Microsoft Ignite just around the corner, there has been a flurry of Azure announcements, services leaving their ‘preview’ status and many new services announced. As apart of this Microsoft have announced this week that their SIEM service - ‘Azure Sentinel’ has gone ‘GA’, which means it is … Continue reading Azure Sentinel goes GA
Just In Time access for VMs
So, you've been working hard to secure your environment by locking down your NSGs (Network Security Groups) and restricting your admins teams access only to find yourself having to open and close ports on the NSG and add people in and out of AD groups every time someone from your IT team needs to access … Continue reading Just In Time access for VMs
Passing the AZ-300
I finally got around to taking the AZ-300: Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies exam this week (well overdue!) as I work towards achiving the 'Azure Solutions Architect Expert' (although I disagree with the term 'expert' with the word Azure - Azure's just too big to be an 'expert' on everything!). As you'd expect and hopefully want … Continue reading Passing the AZ-300
Predicting the weather with RaspberryPi
For this year's Global Azure Bootcamp event I decided to take one of the Microsoft tutorials available on the Microsoft Docs site and bring it to life. For a while I've been interested in the advancements of IoT - although certainly not a new thing IoT has started to explode in use with more and … Continue reading Predicting the weather with RaspberryPi
Availability Zones Gothas!
For those that haven't yet come across availability zones (they're not available in all regions currently but Microsoft are slowly rolling these out) they offer the next level of protection after availability sets. Where an availability set is an anti-affinity solution - you're instructing Azure to not put VMs in the same availability set into … Continue reading Availability Zones Gothas!
Using a Service Principal
If you're looking to automate and script processes and tasks against your Azure environment you'll soon come across the issue of having to authenticate (which is good!) to your environment making your seamless automation script a little more manual. The solution to this problem is to use a Service Principle (SP) with Role Based Access … Continue reading Using a Service Principal
AZ Cheat Sheet
For those that are new to the Azure CLI there are often a few nuances that can take a little getting used to. I will keep this post up to date as I find things I find useful and to help me remember (I have an awful memory!). The Azire CLI uses the argument--query to … Continue reading AZ Cheat Sheet
Azure Global Bootcamp Agenda
We have it, what everyone has been waiting for, the agenda for this year’s Azure Global Bootcamp happening on April, 27th in Manchester! We are at full capacity but please do join the waitlist if you’re wanting to join us. With over 150 people, 3 Gold sponsors, 10+ presentations over two tracks and interactive sessions, … Continue reading Azure Global Bootcamp Agenda
