I thought this was an interesting announcement. Yesterday Microsoft announced a new way to more-simply deploy Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) resources into Azure, along with a new command line tool to drive it with. The tool is called Azure Building Blocks. These building blocks are described as “a set of tools and Azure Resource Manager templates that … Continue reading Azure Building Blocks – Like Legos™ for the cloud?
Let me reveal my answer to you in the form of a couple of test questions:1. Kevin found the test harder than he expected.TrueFalse 2. What areas did Kevin wish he had studied and understood more deeply during the test?A. Code. Actual C# code against Azure web and identity services B. Azure Functions. I know … Continue reading Update: Did Kevin pass Azure test 70-532?
This is an interesting development. I had a good friend and respected local technologist mention this to me the other day, and he wasn’t happy. “Why would they take away features? Just to be ‘consistent’?” Apparently his take on this is that Microsoft is reducing something that was powerful down to a subset of its … Continue reading DSC: Cut to the Core
“Empowering every organization and every individual on the planet to achieve more.” It’s an ambitious statement and Microsoft’s vision for a more productive work force and everyday life experiences. But how do we get there? Today we’re kicking off a new series entitled “Tech Futures” which is devoted to the idea of exploring new possibilities … Continue reading New TechNet Radio Series: Tech Futures
In this final part of our series we walk through the PowerShell script that connects to Azure, creates the resource group, and then launches the creation of the lab environment. We also walk through the final couple of manual steps required to complete the lab setup https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/FullofIT/ARMPart6/player The series landing page on "Full of … Continue reading How I automated a hands-on-lab infrastructure – The PowerShell Script and completing the build (Part 6)
In the 6th part of our series we look at some of the remaining requirements for our lab environment, and how we automatically launched a PowerShell script on each of our virtual machines to perform the final machine-dependent tasks. https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/FullofIT/ARMPart5/player The series landing page on "Full of I.T.": https://aka.ms/AZInfraLabBlog “The Links” document : https://aka.ms/AZInfraLabLinks Kevin’s … Continue reading How I automated a hands-on-lab infrastructure – Additional Automations (Part 5)
Our lab environment requires that several sample scripts and other utilities be available on several of the member servers. But how do we get those files onto the C: drive? In this video I'll show how that was accomplished. https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/FullofIT/ARMPart4/player The series landing page on "Full of I.T.": https://aka.ms/AZInfraLabBlog “The Links” document : https://aka.ms/AZInfraLabLinks … Continue reading How I automated a hands-on-lab infrastructure – Copy down files (Part 4)
In the fourth part of our series we look at how to automatically join the three other virtual machines to the contoso.com domain, again using an custom extension in our Azure Resource Manager template. https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/FullofIT/ARMPart3/player The series landing page on "Full of I.T.": https://aka.ms/AZInfraLabBlog “The Links” document : https://aka.ms/AZInfraLabLinks Kevin’s GitHub lab base repository : … Continue reading How I automated a hands-on-lab infrastructure – Domain-Join the member servers (Part 3)
It's not enough just to create a new virtual machine. Our lab environment requires a pre-configured domain, and so in part 2 we find and utilize and extension that automatically configures one of our virtual machines as the first domain controller in the lab "contoso.com" domain. https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/FullofIT/ARMPart2/player The series landing page on "Full of … Continue reading How I automated a hands-on-lab infrastructure – Create a Domain Controller (Part 2)
In the second part of this series we discuss the components that make up the schema for JSON-based Azure Resource Manager templates. We also look at some of the initial building blocks that our example creates, such as the networking objects and Azure storage required. https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/FullofIT/ARMPart1/player The series landing page on "Full of I.T.": https://aka.ms/AZInfraLabBlog … Continue reading How I automated a hands-on-lab infrastructure – Working with JSON (Part 1)
Absolutely Full of I.T. 