In my previous post on using VS Code for authoring ARM templates I recommended using an ARM Snippets from the plugin gallery. However since then I have come to realise this plugin is fairly limited in the amount of plugins, and difficult to extend. Given this I would now recommend utilising the set of snippets provided by the Azure Cross Platform Tooling Samples These snippets don’t have a...
If your writing ARM templates for Azure you’ll have found that the amount of tooling available for authoring templates is fairly limited. The default solution seems to be Visual Studio but this can be very heavyweight and resource intensive without gaining any of the real benefits of VS such as debugging. I’ve recently switched over from using Visual Studio to use Visual Studio Code...
I’ve seen quite a few forum posts of late asking something along the lines of “Why can’t I create A series VM’s any more” so I thought it worth a quick post to detail what’s up and how to fix it. The problem here is that if you use the Azure portal to create a VM and use the defaults provided, when you come to selecting a VM your presented with a Window like...
In the second part of this series we look at Virtual Machine and other associated IaaS components and how these translate from AWS to Azure. As with the previous article, the intent here is to provide a high level overview of the service and relate it to it’s AWS counterpart so those of you that are coming to Azure from AWS know where to start looking for the services you need and the...
Azure App Service Certificates provide a convenient way to purchase SSL certificates and assign them to Azure Apps right from within the portal, but one question I see a lot is whether it is possible to use this certificate elsewhere, outside of the app service, particularly if you have purchased a wild-card certificate. The certificate provided by App Service Certificates isn’t anything...
Following on from my post on joining Azure batch pools to a vNet, this leads on to a requirement to access resources on the vNet and this means credentials are needed. Rather than hard-coding these credentials in scripts, we want to obtain these from a secure storage location on demand and this is where Azure KeyVault comes in, providing a secure, encrypted storage location for our credentials...
User profile disks for RDP session hosts are VHD files used to store the users profile information so that it can roam with the user between session hosts. By default the UPD’s are mounted on the session hosts at login, and appear as symlinks under the C:\users folder so that applications can access them using standard profile paths, this all works fine without any setup required. There may...
A recent update to Azure Batch added the ability to join a batch pool to a virtual network. By doing so it is possible for batch compute nodes to access resources inside a vNet (file servers, SQL servers etc.). vNet Requirements There are some limitations on the vNet configuration if you wish to do this: Only Cloud Services Configuration pools can be assigned a VNet. This is no longer the case...
I’ve seen a few forum questions lately from AWS users who want to (or have to) use Azure and whilst there are a lot of similar services in either platform, the new user experience and terminology can be very confusing if your used to AWS. This article is the first in a series of posts that I’m hoping will help users coming from AWS get to grips with Azure. To be very clear, I’m...
The AAD DS team has released new features that mean some of the limitations in this article are no longer present. Be sure to read my update on this service to get the latest information. Azure AD has always been a little bit confusing to new users of Azure, the name implies it’s a cloud version of AD, but it quickly becomes clear to most that it very much is not. However, to add more...
