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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
AKS in a Security Conscious Enterprise
Containers and in particular Kubernetes popularity has been going from strength to strength of late. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is the blue PaaS-like offering of this where the vendor manages the masters and you just need to maintain the agent nodes, better still you only pay for the compute. But like all things PaaS, while […]
Azure PowerShell ‘Az’ Module
Azure PowerShell ‘Az’ Module version 1.0 Microsoft released a new PowerShell module specifically for Azure late last year called “Az”. On the plus side Az ensures that Windows PowerShell and PowerShell Core users can get the latest Azure tooling from PowerShell on every platform be it Windows PowerShell or PowerShell Core for my preferred operating […]
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 […]
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 […]
Backup Palo Alto VM Series Config with Azure Automation
If you have implemented a VM-Series firewall in Azure, AWS or on-premises but don’t have a Panorama Server for your configuration backups. Here is a solutions for getting the firewall configuration into an Azure Blob Storage, this could be done similarly with Lambda and S3 using python and the boto3 library. Why Do This? If […]
Cross Region, Peering Pitfalls. .
Ah if only all pitfalls were fun. Remember Pitfall on the Atari 2600. It was the second best selling game after Pac-Man. Pitfall Harry had to negotiate a jungle full of hazardous quicksand, rolling logs, fire and rattle snakes to recover precious treasures. Recently we did some work with a customer where they made use of […]
Lazy Afternoons with Azure ARM Conditionals
Like many IT professionals I spent my early years in the industry working in customer oriented support roles. Working in a support role can be challenging. You are the interface between the people who consume IT services and the complexity of the IT department. You interact with a broad range of people who use the […]