Automating Azure Site Recovery with PowerShell
In a recent consulting engagement, I’ve needed to perform a large-scale migration of a company’s virtual machine (VM) fleet from an On-premise datacenter to Microsoft Azure. Thinking about what that actually means – We’re picking up many compute workloads that are (in most cases) essential for day to day business operation and re-homing them to […]
SD-WAN made easy
I’ll start by asking you two questions: Are you paying too much for your Wide Area Network (WAN)? And, is it the best method of connecting to the public Cloud? At cloudstep.io we are constantly looking for ways to improve our customers connectivity to the public cloud. We consider cloud network connectivity a foundation service […]
Tagging EC2 EBS Volumes in Auto Scaling Groups
Tagging becomes a huge part of your life when in the public cloud. Metadata is thrown around like hotcakes, and why not. At cloudstep.io we preach the ways of the DevOps gods and especially infrastructure as code for repeatable and standardised deployments. This way everything is uniform and everything gets a TAG! I ran into […]
The OVF package is invalid and cannot be deployed – In the trenches with the AWS Discovery Connector
I was working with a customer recently who had trouble deploying the AWS Discovery Connector to their VMware environment. AWS offer this appliance as an OVA file. For those who aren’t aware, OVA (Open Virtualisation Archive) is an open standard used to describe virtual infrastructure to be deployed on a hypervisor of your choice. Typically […]
AWS ECS CloudFormation Fails – Unable to assume the service linked role.
I ran into an interesting issue when building a new ECS Cluster using CloudFormation. The CloudFormation stack would fail on Type: AWS::ECS::Service with error: Unable to assume the service linked role. Please verify that the ECS service linked role exists. (Service: AmazonECS; Status Code: 400; Error Code: InvalidParameterException; Request ID: beadf3d5-3406-11e9-828d-b16cd52796ef) Okay google, what’s this […]
Planning a move to the cloud with the AWS Application Discovery Service
Here at cloudstep, we love to help our customers achieve their goals. We believe that the cloud is a tool in the toolbox and we can use that multi-facet tool to help our customers realise success. Planning for success starts with goals, and goals come in many different shapes and sizes. For any given solution, […]
Add VC Accounts to Microsoft Teams Channels with Azure Automation
At cloudstep.io® HQ Microsoft Teams is a big part of how we organise digital asset structure in the business. We are a consulting firm by trade, as new prospects become paying customers we add them as a team. The default General channel is used for administration and accounts, additional channels are created per project name […]
AWS obtain PROTECTED level certification for Australian Region
Earlier this week Amazon Web Services made a statement, indicating that the battle of tier-one public cloud providers is still heating up. Yesterday Matthew Graham (AWS Head of Security Assurance for Australia and New Zealand) announced that The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) had awarded PROTECTED certification to AWS for 42 of their cloud services. […]
Using the AWS CLI for Process Automation
Amazon Web Services is a well established cloud provider. In this blog, I am going to explore how we can interface with the orange cloud titan programmatically. First of all, lets explore why we may want to do this. You might be thinking “But hey, the folks at AWS have built a slick web interface which […]
Warm AWS WorkSpaces On a Schedule
AWS WorkSpaces VDI solution has two pricing options that you need to choose between for your implementation. Monthly Hourly (On demand) In my opinion it is always worth attempting to run your WorkSpaces VDI deployment in on-demand where there is chance of cost savings when the virtual desktops can be turned off and you will […]