Azure ☁️

Don’t you just love it when you open your laptop first thing on a Monday morning, a fresh cup of coffee at the ready and you think to yourself … This should be a straight-forward five-minute job to start the week with … and it turns out to be anything but? That is exactly what happened to me this week, I won’t go into too much detail, but I was working on an Azure Logic App that had to interact with an external service and pass it a a fully signed SAS URL for an Azure Storage Account so that it could send some quite large files there. You would assume that the Azure Blob connector↗ would be able to do this, and you would be correct as there is a “Create SAS URI by path (V2)” action: ...

This is a quick post to share a useful KQL query for Azure Firewalls that I’ve been using. It’s based on the default Firewall query from Microsoft, but with some added variables to allow for a more focused analysis of source and destination traffic. I’m putting it here for my future reference and in case it’s helpful for anyone else. Azure Firewall Query with Variables This query allows you to analyze Azure Firewall logs, focusing on specific source and destination IP addresses within a defined time range. It’s particularly useful for troubleshooting and security analysis. ...

This is a quick post collating some of the notes for KQL queries for Azure Virtual Desktop I have in various documents into a single place, just in case they are helpful for anyone and also for my reference, 👋 hello future Russ. Find out all the IP addresses in the last 30 days This query looks at the past 30 days, counting connections by username and client IP address, then sorts these counts in descending order, adds geolocation data for each IP, and finally outputs the client IP, connection count, and location details (country, state, and city) to provide insights into connection patterns and frequencies across different users and locations in the Windows Virtual Desktop environment. ...

Back in May 2020 I published what would be one of the more popular posts on this blog Azure DevOps Ansible Pipeline, it covered the Azure DevOps pipeline I had settled upon for running my Ansible playbooks which built and interacted with workloads running in Microsoft Azure. Fast forward four years, I updated the pipeline for Chapter 15 of the second edition of Learn Ansible↗ ; this version of the pipeline, which is covered in detail in the book, can be found in the repo linked below; ...

During the day job, I have to get a little creative with controlling costs for Azure resources; there are some everyday tasks and scenarios where Azure Logic Apps can help you save money 💰. The first is quite a typical scenario: stopping and starting Azure Virtual Machines. There was a time when I would have just used an Azure Automation Account and the Microsoft-supplied workflow. Still, Automation Accounts are a little (well, a lot) too reliant on PowerShell for my macOS using / Linux administrating tastes. ...

I am pleased to announce that my latest book, “Infrastructure as Code for Beginners,” is now available for purchase. Over the last six months, I have fully dedicated myself to this project, channeling my experience and knowledge into providing a resource that simplifies the complexities of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The importance of IaC cannot be overstated in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape. IaC ensures consistent and repeatable deployment of cloud-based services, thereby saving time while delivering robust results. However, understanding and effectively implementing IaC can be a challenge for many, and that’s where this book comes in. ...

Following on from upgrading my Macs to all M1-based ones, I get around to finally needing to use Ansible; typically, I would install Python using PyEnv and then run the following … It should just work?!?! pip install --user ansible pip install --user -r https://github.com/ansible-collections/azure/blob/dev/requirements-azure.txt ansible-galaxy collection install azure.azcollection … and away we go, but this time I came across a few problems. The first was the following error when installing the requirements using the remote requirements-azure.txt file: ...

Probably a little late to the party with this one, but I have recently upgraded to an M1 Pro MacBook Pro, for the most part, the problems with moving to arm64 are not as bad as I thought - most are annoying little things. However, the biggest one came when I decided to take a serious look at Bicep. After installing the Bicep VSCode extension ↗ and opening a test Bicep file, I was greeted with the following message … ...