So you’re interested in the Cloud, in particular, the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Great, now what? Where do you start? Most organizations that are interested in Azure start off by trying to determine which workloads could be moved to the cloud, and what type of return on investment (ROI) and cost savings they’ll receive. The challenge…
Many organizations are moving mission critical applications to Azure. A lot of organizations are starting to explore Microsoft Azure as a Disaster Recovery (DR) site to their existing datacenters. If you haven’t started to consider this, Microsoft provides several tools to assess your “Cloud Readiness”, and help you estimate the costs, and ROI, in moving…
A few years ago I had the privilege to attend Azure Site Recovery Boot Camp training at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley in Mountain View, CA. The experience was amazing, and I enjoyed it. In fact, we received a first-hand preview of the (yet to be released) ASR VMware replication/protection through the newly acquired InMage technology. The training was led by Vishal…
Backup is always that unsung hero. It’s there in the background, and no one notices it, that is until it’s needed. And with the ever-growing volume of data, backing up becomes more and more of a challenge. Sure, storage companies continue to push the envelope on hard drive sizes, now reaching upwards of 10+ TB…
Recently, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS). It’s technically a part of Azure Backup offering, but it’s a little different. In fact, it is more like System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) “lite”. Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS), is functionally equivalent to System Center DPM with 3 differences: It can protect workloads that are running on Hyper-V,…
In this article, I will explain to you all the endless possibilities of 314159U in traditional calculations and modern computing. The digital era opens endless possibilities for new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Super Calculations, and so on. What Is 314159U? 314159U is a sequence of natural numbers that has a special place…
In the introduction to this series, we listed the 4 high-level categories of Azure governance, namely resource organization, resource security, auditing, and cost. In this part, we will focus on Resource Organization. You can break Resource Organization down into the following sub-categories: Subscriptions, Management Groups, Resources Groups, and Tags. Let’s explore each of these. Subscriptions Put simply, an Azure Subscription…
Over the past several months, I have been ramping up on the Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templating language called Terraform for a project that I am engaged in. And while I do not have anything against Terraform (after all, it IS very easy to read), I have stated my opinions on the whole “cloud agnostic” statement via my previous…
In this series, we will explore all of the tools and mechanisms that make up an Azure Governance Toolbox. As in a normal toolbox, we have different tools for different jobs. Some have an overlapping function (i.e. you can use a hammer to subsequently use a nail to fasten 2 objects together, or you can use…
Recently, I finished reading Terraform Cookbook: Efficiently define, launch, and manage Infrastructure as Code across various cloud platforms by Mikael Krief. I am already experienced with Terraform, and have read 3 other Terraform books, along with many other articles, blogs, and videos. Not to mention my own blog posts about Terraform, my 3-part video series on “Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Using…