Rightsizing IaaS and PaaS on Microsoft Azure is one of the most important activities you can undertake when deploying your environment into Microsoft Azure and its something I’ve seen not get the attention that I think it warrants. It’s incredibly easy to oversize within Microsoft Azure, its so scalable, you can deploy servers with terabytes of RAM and hundreds of cores… but of course just because you can doesn’t mean you should!

So I recently hit an issue when trying to install Azure Backup Server on a Windows 2012 R2 server in an environment that used WPAD. Azure Backup Server allows you to backup your on-premise infrastructure to local disk storage while also providing the ability to backup to an Azure Recovery Services Vault, allowing offsite long-term retention. MABS – image courtesy of Microsoft The install failed at a couple of points, signing into Azure when selecting a backup vault and later in the installation as well.

Packer is an open source tool that can be used to define and build custom images in Microsoft Azure. Packer works across multiple platforms and will seamlessly work with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to create and store custom images in Azure. If you want to create your own custom images in Azure with Packer hopefully this introduction guide will help you make a start with that. At a high level there are 4 steps to capturing an image.

Looks like another new feature has been added to Azure, the More Services blade has been replaced with All Services which appears at the top of the Portal. I quite like the change, its certainly easier to see the hundreds of services that are available in Azure… **Why wait? – Get started today with a Free Azure account **(https://www.nblabs.net/2018/01/15/run-azure-free-1-year/) All Services

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is used to provide automation of building, testing and deploying software into production environments. CI/CD has grown in popularity as it allows for greater efficiency in software development which in short allows developers to deliver quality code faster to the end user. The pipeline breaks down the delivery of software into different stages which as the name pipeline suggests, flow into each other. Automation is at the centre of the pipeline, each stage is automated, from build, onto testing, flowing down to deployment.

Augmented rules for Network Security Groups (NSGs) has gone GA! Having used NSGs extensively since I started working in Azure, I know augmented security rules will make NSGs much easier to build out and manage. You now have the capability to create a single rule with multiple source IPs, destination IPs, and ports, something that previously would have required multiple rules. Take the following example, I want to permit my source machine (10.

Microsoft have recently announced the introduction of the Azure free account. This gives you the ability to run select Azure services for free for 12 months. This is a great way to run services in Azure at no cost to you and provides a means to get hands on with Azure over the long term. Something I should call out is that under the terms and conditions of an Azure free account is the offer is only available to you if you’re a new Azure customer, so if you’ve never had a free trial or never been a paying Azure customer you can avail of the offer.

Marketplace terms… If you’ve ever deployed resources into Azure from the Marketplace at the point of deployment you’ll often see the screen shown below: You’re accepting the terms of use for the Marketplace offering for the subscription you’re currently working within. However if you try to deploy a resource from the Marketplace through a json template and you’ve not accepted the terms previously you’ll get an error like so: The error message is fairly self explanatory, Code=MarketplacePurchaseEligibilityFailed indicates you’re not eligible to deploy the resource and Legal terms have not been accepted for this item on this subscription make it clear what the issue is.

Recovery Options When it comes to Azure VM recovery you’ve a few options available, you can: Create an Azure virtual machine from your backup Restore the disks associated with the Azure VM Create a virtual machine from backup The first thing I should call out with this option is that this process creates a new Azure VM attached to the disks that are being restored. Why does that matter?