Today at the Build Conference, Microsoft announced the Azure Mobile app for iOS and Android (with a UWP app to come soon). I’ve had access to this app for a while during the preview and whilst it’s never going to replace the web portal for the majority of Azure work and has fairly limited functionality at the minute, it does provide a handy tool for times you need to make a change on the go or just need to check a setting or view some stats.
Microsoft have now added first class conditions to the language so this workaround is no longer required. See this article on how to use this feature.**
ARM Templates are a great tool for deploying complex sets of resources in Azure, however as it currently stands there is no concept of an “If” statement in a template. This can make it much more difficult to support the re-use of code and to avoid duplication in your templates, if you have to create a whole new set of templates which are 95% the same but with one section being different.
Resource Manager Locks provide a way for administrators to lock down Azure resources to prevent deletion or changing of a resource. These locks sit outside of the Role Based Access Controls (RBAC) hierarchy and when applied will place the restriction on the resource for all users. These are very useful when you have an important resource in your subscription which users should not be able to delete or change and can help prevent accidental and malicious changes or deletion.
Earlier last week Microsoft announced the public preview of the VM Instance Metadata service. This service allows you to query information about a VM, from inside the VM itself, it’s something that has been available on AWS for a long time and has some really interesting uses for users or code running inside your virtual machines. In this post we’ll dig a bit deeper into the service and how it can be used.
Back in November I published an article on Azure Active Directory Domain Services (AAD DS), detailing some of the limitations of the service and what it is and isn’t intended for. If you’ve not read that I recommend going back and reading through that first so this article makes sense.
Since this article was published there have been some big updates to the service that mean some of these limitations have gone away, so I thought it was time to detail some of these changes and what they mean for Azures Domain Controller as a Service offering.
Microsoft’s Log Analytics platform, part of the OMS Suite, allows you to pull in and analyse data from a wide variety of source for your operational needs. One of these sources of data is from Azure Monitor, the monitoring solution built into the Azure platform.
Azure Monitor is great on it’s own when you want to look at performance or log data for a specific resource, but when you want to look at this data across your whole estate and be able to dashboard and alert on this, you need to aggregate and analyse this in Log Analytics.
Since writing this article I’ve released a VS Code Extension that installs these snippets with a single click, see here.
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
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, for a much more light weight experience.
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 this:
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 documentation to help you get started.
