Last month I moved my blog from AWS hosting to Azure, as I mentioned in my blog Moving my blog from AWS to Azure. My blog is currently hosted on WordPress and when I migrated it I chose to build a IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) virtual machine. Maybe not the most “modern” solution for hosting with the public cloud however I wanted to try IaaS as a first step so I could brush up on my Linux skills. So…
Recently the question of how can we trigger stop all virtual machines (VMs) within the Azure platform when a certain event happens was posed. As I’m sure you’re all aware there is a auto shutdown of VMs within Azure which is triggered using day/time. However this time we were being asked to trigger shut down of the VMs if a business event occurred or if an email alert from the monitoring system contained a certain word. In order to resolve…
In a previous article I covered off what Azure Policy was and explained some of the features that it had. At the time I mentioned that there are a number of built in/pre configured policies and initiatives that you can use, however I have been looking at designing and implementing custom policies to meet additional needs. While looking at creating the policies from scratch I learnt some valuable lessons and wanted to share them with you all. Assigning policies with…
Over the years I have attended a lot of events, both paid and free community events. And as I’m sure many of you are I’ve been organising the Glasgow Azure User Group events over the past 11 months, this blog post is just some of my thoughts on how you can #BeAGoodAttendee at these events. If you’ve signed up (even for a free ticket) and can no longer attend, let the organiser know. It helps them to understand who to…
On the 21st April 2018, in 21 countries and 250 different locations event organizers all ran a Global Azure Bootcamp event. The initiative has been running for several years now but 2018 was the first time Glasgow has hosted an event! Hosted by the Glasgow Azure User Group the IT community came together to learn and share their Azure knowledge. The event had three speakers covering how to get certified in Azure, Serverless and Azure Stack. It was a glorious…
I was recently asked if there was a way of tracking basic metrics from Virtual Machine (VM) within Operations Management Suite (OMS), such as CPU usage, Disk Usage and Memory Usage. Unfortunately there isn’t out the box available within OMS that can be easily set up to do this. However the ability to do it does exist with a little bit of configuration. You are able to collect this data at frequent intervals to allow for Near Real Time (NRT)…
I was kindly given a Jabra Evolve 75e headset to review recently. This is a new headset from Jabra, it is the world’s first unified communication (UC) certified wireless earbuds. In a recent review of the Jabra Evolve 65 headset I covered off four pillars, Sound Quality, Comfort, Setup and Noise Cancellation. I am going to cover those four pillars again in this review. Sound Quality As I’ve become accused to the sound quality of Jabra headsets is excellent. The…
Azure Policy is a service within Azure that is currently in Preview. It has been designed to help you to enforce different rules and actions over your resources, which enables your resources to stay compliant with your corporate standards. It comes with a lot of “out of the box” or “built in” policy templates that you can start using but this week I’ve been looking at using Azure Policy, both the built in examples and creating custom ones. I thought…
I was given the Techair 15.6″ Grey EVO Magnetic Laptop Messenger bag a month ago to review. I’ve been using it as my to-go bag for travelling for work. For the last seven years as a consultant that travels between customer sites I’ve always preferred a backpack for carrying my laptop, cables, food, water, clothes etc. But as my current commute involves planes, trains and undergrounds, having a messenger bag has been ideal in terms of saving space. Techair Techair are a…
Back in December 2016 I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress and also changed from a free hosting provider to Amazon Web Services (AWS). At the time it was a good move as I was able to take advantage of free services from AWS. However since January 2017 I have been paying for the hosting, at £8.40 a month. So after some research and planning I decided to move my blog to Azure. In order to keep costs low…