Tuesday, July 31, 2018

An Overview of Azure Firewall

One thing I love about Azure networking is how simple is it to create a Virtual Network and the set of features that allow in configuration. It has almost all. That was very helpful when configuring some SharePoint development environments even back in 2015. Things shall be much better right now. 

With the Azure Firewall you can protect the virtual networks very easily. Azure firewall capabilities are high in availability and easy to scale. Even can be set to scale automatically. Another major advantage is that the firewall capabilities can be configured all from the Azure platform interface. You do not need to be running the scripts for everything. Azure firewall supports setting network level filtering rules at resources located in multiple virtual networks as well as multiple subscriptions. 
How it Works:
Source: Azure Blog

Monday, July 30, 2018

Move your data to Azure with Azure Data Box Disks

May be you need to moved your data to cloud or may be you might consider updating a data set to the cloud. If the data set is smaller,  it is easy as it can get. But how about having terrabytes of data moving to cloud?

It will take time, process may get stuck in the middle and may have to restart or you will run out of bandwidth and so many things can happen. Microsoft knows this and that is why they went beyond terrabytes and provided a solution that can let you even move petabytes of data to Azure. That is Azure Data Box Disk.

It simply follows a procedure where you can Order a Data Box, then fill it once received and then return to be copied to Azure.

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Public preview of Azure Virtual WAN

Think about an organization with multiple branches located around the world. They may access the same resources as it can be not necessary to create a resource per each branch. Tools such as Software-Defined Wide Area Networks can be used to improve these resources via effective request routing. Intelligent routing facilitates reaching Microsoft's global backbone network faster to have a quick response time. But there can be issues when at instances such as scaling, enforcing network policies and managing the connectivity.

Security attacks can happen any time when you are more and more vulnerable. That is why organizations create Network security teams, But security shall not always come up to the priority in expense of performance. Azure Virtual WAN simplifies and make the connectivity at large-scale more effective when on cloud.

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Dev Spaces for Azure Kubernetes Services Released!

The public preview of Dev Spaces for Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) is now there to try out. Now you can build and debug applications for Kubernetes – only available on Azure

Usage:
Forget about using different local development environments for fixing bugs and working on changes. We are working in teams where interconnected components within the solutions such as MicroServices are common. You can team up and host the testing code on Azure DevSpaces and only change and test what you need to test. This simplifies the process of development and reduce the errors that are found when an integrated test is done just before the release. 

Set Up:
You just need to get ready with your IDE and Azure CLI (Command Line Interface).
Just Create a new Dev Space inside AKS and begin working on any component.

Use following command to Create a new Dev Space inside AKS


azds space select --name testDevSpace



Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Azure CosmosDB Explorer

The newly added tool for azure cosmos db is Cosmos DB Explorer.  Days are gone where the Storage Explorer is used instead.

What's Inside
  • Full screen real estate view for the queries and results
  • No need of access of azure subscription portal any more. Rather than accessing through the portal, the connection string can be used to simply access the DB account and collections.
  • Share your query result as read only view with your colleagues. (Does not require Azure portal access)
  • No desktop tools needed anymore. Work with cosmos db directly with Explorer

Thursday, July 5, 2018

Static website hosting for Azure Storage

The public preview of static website hosting for Azure Storage has released on June 28, 2018! This is great news and it will be available in all public regions for azure and will also support government and sovereign clouds as well. Gone are the days where you treat static websites and web applications and allocate more resources than what they really need. This will save lot of costs as its just displaying files as it is.

A static website means there are no server side code. No database connections as well. A static website will consist of mark up pages, JavaScript and CSS. There are many such sites, probably in public portals which are used to host on Azure Web Apps. No anymore. 

A major part of cloud is about cost saving and being simple whenever possible. With Static Website hosting, there is no need for server management. Content are stored in Azure Storage and is going to help to be on Serverless.