Category: Infrastructure

How to get Azure Data Factory connecting to your data on a VNet (or internal network)

Azure Data Factory (ADF) is a great tool as part of your cloud based ETL tool set. However not all your data is necessarily accessible from the public internet. These instruction go through the steps required to allow ADF access to your internal or VNet data-sets.

Continue reading “How to get Azure Data Factory connecting to your data on a VNet (or internal network)”

My Microsoft Azure Certification Revision Sheets

I finally successfully passed the three exams necessary to certify as a Microsoft MCSD: Azure Solution Architect (now becoming the MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure). \o/

  • Exam 70-532: Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions
  • Exam 70-533: Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions
  • Exam 70-534: Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions

It was no easy feat, not least because of the absolutely massive number of topics that you need to learn, but also that Microsoft decided to update the syllabus’s of all three exams just as I was ready to take them (Nov/Dec 2016). Continue reading “My Microsoft Azure Certification Revision Sheets”

How to delete an Azure Active Directory (ADD) Tenant

You may have discovered that deleting an Azure Active Directory is a particularly frustrating experience that ultimately ends in failure. The new portal have improved things a bit, by running through a series of check before the delete button is enabled.

You may need to go back to the Classic portal (https://manage.windowsazure.com) to see some of the objects/resources to delete.

However, although this will help you remove ‘most’ of what you need to, unfortunately NOT all!

In this case I got a “Unable to delete directory

Continue reading “How to delete an Azure Active Directory (ADD) Tenant”

Azure App Service – Force redirect from HTTP to HTTPS the easy way!

Once you have uploaded your SSL certificates to your Azure App Service and then configured the bindings (if you are using your own custom domains), there are two ways to force ALL requests to be redirected  from HTTP to HTTPS. The ‘Developer way‘ and the ‘Easy, no code way‘! Continue reading “Azure App Service – Force redirect from HTTP to HTTPS the easy way!”

“Resource group not found” when using PowerShell with Azure (especially DSC)

I have been banging my head against a wall wondering why my Azure PowerShell DSC commands like

Publish-AzureRmVMDscConfiguration  ".\MyDSCConfig.ps1" 
            -ResourceGroupName "VM-Training" -StorageAccountName "hmsvmtraindsc"

was failing with a “Resource Group not found“, even though other commands worked with that Resource Group and my current context.

The answer is do NOT use the x64 build of PowerShell or the “Windows PowerShell ISE”!

Use the x86 versions for now!

I found this advice at the bottom of this page https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/turn-on-windows-feature-using-dsc-cli/, and switching to the x86 ISE worked for me!

However, when I tried to reproduce the issue on the x64 ISE, the command worked fine??? However, by that time the Blob container had been created by the x86 version, so who know?

If I get time I will try to reproduce the error, otherwise please post a comment if the same thing happened to you.

 

Interactive Microsoft Datacenter Tour

Came across this very nicely put together interactive 3d tour of Microsoft Datacenter.

2016-12-16_16-02-03

Check it out at http://cloud-platform-assets.azurewebsites.net/datacenter/