Thought Provoking, Ideas & Ramblings.
Find the latest business insights, technical solutions and opinions from our team.
Google 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…
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SQL 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.…
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Deploy 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…
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How 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 ten most important strategies for avoiding a devastating financial blowout.
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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…
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Azure 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.
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Oils 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…
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cloudstep – 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…
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Welcome 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…
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Disable-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…
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Understanding 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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Undocumented ARM Oddities – .Net Core App Services
Every once in a while, when working with ARM templates you come across something that is missing from the official Microsoft ARM template reference. In my case yesterday, I was looking to update the configuration of an Azure App Service to use the DotNetCore stack (rather than .NET 4.8). While I initially thought this would…
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Azure Bastion – Unable to query Bastion data.
I’ve recently setup Azure Bastion to give external users/vendors access to resources via RDP or SSH following these instructions: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bastion/tutorial-create-host-portal The key permissions outlined in the prerequisites at point 3 are: A virtual network. A Windows virtual machine in the virtual network. The following required roles: Reader role on the virtual machine. Reader role on…
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Get all restore points for an Azure VM
Getting restore points out of Azure can be like getting blood from a stone. The portal likes to always set a custom filter showing only ~90 days and your Powershell cmdlet only allows for a 30 day interval for retrieval dates. When running ‘Get-AzRecoveryServicesBackupRecoveryPoint’ you get the following: Sigh.. I just want all my restore…
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Azure Application Insights – No Client Source IP Address
Working with one of your customers this week who is implementing Azure API Management alongside their web applications. We are funnelling all the request logs into an Application Insights services to manage visibility of the end-to-end transaction data. We noticed that all the client GET requests had ‘0.0.0.0’ in Client IP Address. Request Properties Value…
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Upgrading Megaport Cloud Routers
Recently I had the pleasure of upgrade a Megaport Cloud Router (MCR) from version 1 to the new version 2. Version 2 MCR sits on a whole new code base and a side by side migration is required. In this blog I’ll show you how we went about the process, this could also be used…
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ARM Template Role Assignment Learnings
ARM templates are one of those things that the learning curve can be considered steep, but once you get there they make your life so much easier you’re glad you did it. If you’re like me, Google is your friend and whenever you hit an issue with your latest template you resort to searching error…
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Assign Teams phone numbers using Microsoft Forms, Logic Apps and Azure Automation
Sometimes provisioning users into Office 365 services requires custom settings to be executed with PowerShell. This can present a problem when the teams responsible for managing the ongoing process have varying levels of understanding. How do you provide a front end user interface for my custom code without the need for the operators to need…
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