Thought Provoking, Ideas & Ramblings.
Find the latest business insights, technical solutions and opinions from our team.
Flutter for mobile app development
Mobile apps have become an essential part of our daily lives, with over 6 billion smartphone users worldwide. As a result, there has been a significant increase in demand for mobile app development. There are two main approaches to mobile app development: In this blog, I’m going to talk about the leading cross-platform framework, Flutter,…
Keep readingSecuring Born in the Cloud Businesses
Everyone’s had this recently. Organisations they partner with are becoming (justifiably) more stringent about their security. It creates some thorny problems though: Born in the Cloud When we’re talking about a Born in the Cloud Business (BITC) we’re talking about this sort of company: Larger organisations like working with businesses like these. They’re small, agile…
Keep readingSingle Cloud or Multi-Cloud: The Ultimate Debate
Today, we’re going to talk about a hotly debated topic in the tech industry – whether to pick a single cloud provider or go for a multi-cloud strategy. As someone who’s been in the industry for a while, I’ve seen companies go back and forth on this topic, and I think it’s time to weigh…
Keep readingCloud Migration: Why Your Business Needs a Robust Business Case
Today I want to talk to you about an important topic that can make or break a company’s success in the digital age: migrating infrastructure to the public cloud. As the world becomes increasingly digital, businesses must adapt to survive. And one of the most significant changes a company can make is moving their infrastructure…
Keep readingThe Cloud Migration Pitfalls You Need to Know: Why Understanding Your Applications is Critical
2 / 2 Public cloud migration for a while has been the the buzzword on everyone’s lips. Often described as a no brainer for organisations where their core business is not managing IT systems. Sure, there are plenty of good reasons to take your organisation’s applications to the cloud: lower costs, better scalability, and increased…
Keep readingAWS EventBridge Triggering SSM Automation IAM Role Error
I recently wanted to create an Amazon EventBridge rule that will schedule an SSM Automation document. A rule watches for certain events (cron in my case) and then routes them to AWS targets that you choose. You can create a rule that performs an AWS action automatically when another AWS action happens, or a rule…
Keep readingMigrate to AWS EC2 with SQL licensing included
While performing a lift and shift migration of Windows SQL Server using the AWS Application Migration Service I was challenged with wanting the newly migrated instance to have a Windows OS license ‘included’ but additionally the SQL Server Standard license billed to the account. The customer was moving away from their current hosting platform where…
Keep readingGoogle Cloud’s Second Region in Australia
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has extended its reach in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) with a second region in Melbourne. Why does this matter? Having two regions inside Australia allows for customers to extend their architecture for highly available or disaster recoverable solutions. Google now join Azure (who has 3) as having multiple regions inside…
Keep readingSQL Database Backup on IaaS using Azure Automation
I had a need to take a full SQL Database backup from a virtual machine with SQL Server hosted on Azure. This is done via an Azure Automation account, executing a runbook on a hybrid worker. This is a great way to take a offline copy of your production SQL and store it someplace safe.To…
Keep readingDeploy Craft CMS with Azure App Service for Linux Containers
Here is some key points to deploy a Craft CMS installation on Azure Web App using container images. In this blog we will step you through some of the modifications needed to make the container image run in Azure and the deployment steps to run in an Azure DevOps Pipeline.CraftCMS have reference material for their…
Keep readingHow to Achieve Cloud Cost Savings by Avoiding These Cost Overruns
Any company that runs for long enough will inevitably run into cost overruns; the key, though, is to minimise the number of cost overruns and mitigate the damage from overruns that occur. However, one of the costliest overruns a company can face has to do with cloud migration. In this article, we will tackle the…
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Fault Tolerant Multi AZ EC2, On a beer budget – live from AWS Meetup
Filmed on 18th of March 2021 at the Adelaide AWS User Group, where Arran Peterson presented on how to put together best practice (and cheap!) cloud architecture for business continuity. The title: “Enterprise grade fault tolerant multi-AZ server deployment on a beer budget” Recording RATED ‘PG’ – Mild course language. Presenter More Reading Amazon Elastic…
Keep readingAzure Migrate – Additional Firewall Rules
When deploying Azure Migrate Appliances to discovery servers, the appliance needs outbound internet access. In many IT environments, servers are disallowed internet access unless prescribed to certain URL sets. Gratefully Microsoft have given us a list of what they think is the list of URLs that the appliance will need to have whitelisted. This can…
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Pimp my VS Code
Those who know me, know that I have a keen interest in software tools and exploring the various different ways that people use them. I take great joy in exploring custom or 3rd party plugins and add-ons to get the most out of the tools I use every day. From OS automation tools (like BetterTouchTool)…
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A new year, a new logo
The start of 2021 brings a new logo to cloudstep, as we start to refresh our look.
Keep readingOils ain’t Oils and Neither are Calculators.
Some of you may remember the Castrol oil commercials on Australian television throughout the late 1980’s where they claimed than not all oils are created equally. – If not indulge yourself in 43 seconds of nostalgic cinematic genius. 1988 CASTROL GTX2 Oils Ain’t Oils Such is true with cloud pricing calculators. Whilst these are invaluable…
Keep readingcloudstep – The value proposition for consulting firms.
Cloudstep is a tool for consulting firms, built by a consulting firm. It makes it easy to capture existing capital and operational IT expenditure for an organisation and make accurate comparisons against alternate IT delivery options. We built cloudstep to make it easy to sell consulting engagements for professional services focused around cloud migrations. Build…
Keep readingWelcome 2020ne – “are we there yet?”
“are we there yet?…. are we there yet?….” In vacations past, this was the back seat cry heard by many young parents as they sought the refuge of a far-away campsite or holiday house in search of some peace and quiet after a hectic and busy year. Clearly, 2020 was no normal year and it…
Keep readingDisable-CsAdForest – “Cannot remove the Active Directory settings for the domain due to ‘FE’ still being activated”
I’ve spent 15 years deploying on-premises versions of Microsoft Unified Communications, namely OCS, Lync & Skype for Business. During that period I did a lot of installations, but never had I done a full removal of the product. I guess that speaks to the usability of Microsoft Voice solutions. Once your in, the years just…
Keep readingUnderstanding Undocumented ARM Oddities
Over the past year I’ve been working pretty heavily with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to create safe, reusable and consistent deployments of virtual infrastructure. When producing ARM templates, it’s important to understand what resource types are available, and what values to use in your template. I always use the Azure Template Reference to understand…
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