I recently purchased an Asus Zephyrus G15 (2021) laptop with a Ryzen 9 5900HS processor and RTX 3070 GPU. I really enjoy the light weight, relatively diminutive size and curiously long battery life of this machine which also packs a performance punch when needed. However, one thing I was not prepared for was Asus and […]
My work frequently involves using remote, ephemeral, containers to run scripts/code/whatever for DevOps type automation. Typically these containers are running some flavor of Linux. My work also frequently involves designing these automations for Azure and using Terraform for IaC. On occasion though, I find the need to drop out of “declarative” mode and utilize scripted […]
Working with Terraform to build VM’s in Azure for proof-of-concept work, I often opt to use Ubuntu for my Linux systems. Up until 18.04 everything worked fine but when I tried to go to 20.04 or later my Terraform deployment would error out with: Failure sending request: StatusCode=404 — Original Error: Code="PlatformImageNotFound" Message="The platform image […]
In something that has seemingly become an annual holiday tradition, I recently moved this WordPress site to a new hosting provider. This time I left was evicted from Oracle. I am always on the hunt for the absolute bargain option when it comes to hosting… but I also want my website to be decently performant. […]
I have been working on a project that requires me to interact with upwards of 10 separate repositories at once, typically referencing a handful of them and while actively making changes and commits across three of them. A lot of my time is eaten up with switching between windows in an attempt to find the […]
Have you ever come across something in your IT career that makes you think to yourself “How did I come this far having missed this for so many years?” I had one of those moments this morning when it dawned on me that I didn’t instinctively know how to create or update environment variables in […]
A few months back I started using Azure Tables as a quick, cheap, and simple database for a project at work. I was recently re-factoring my main Powershell script which spits data out into an Azure Table for later PowerBI reporting. Thankfully, even though it was close to midnight, my years of “ops management brain” […]
Halloween is over but the the world is still a scary place. In a continuation of a thought from an article I wrote a few weeks back for Auditing AzureSQL Firewall Policies, I thought I would also include a short function for auditing azure storage accounts that are currently configured for “public” access. Why are […]
I recently overhauled a script that I wrote to take advantage of the parallel processing functionality that is included in Microsoft Powershell 7. The results have been excellent with script runtimes being reduced from over an hour down to roughly 5 minutes. Learning the ins-and-outs of using parallel processing was a bit of a chore […]
When your business hinges upon remote workers and remote offices, secure connections, and lots of data manipulation… how do you deal with some of your folks being extra remote? Granted the internet in 2020 is very different from the internet in say 2008 and the world has grown ever smaller as a result… but distance […]
The current state of the world has caused some unique stresses on IT infrastructure. For IT departments servicing internal teams, remote access infrastructure in particular has felt the brunt of the blow. To that end, I spent a couple of weeks testing out enterprise VPN solutions.
I work on Azure Tenants that utilize multiple subscriptions in their design. I wanted to centralize my Azure Automation work and use a single Automation account. By default, I found that powershell scripts I fired off from Azure Automation work within the subscription that the Automation account was created within. But business requirements necessitate multiple […]
Continuing on my journey up the Azure Automation mountain, I recently completed a simple AZ PowerShell script that takes several input parameters and scales UP or scales DOWN a given AzureSQL database instance depending on what time of day it is. Before I go any further, if you are just getting started in Azure Automation, […]
I have been using Powershell to manage pieces of Azure on and off for about a year and half now. I had heard tell of Azure Automation but never really had a good reason to justify spending the time climbing that particular mountain (hill really…). Then the request came through… let’s scale AzureSQL databases up […]