Author: Alan Kinane

Intro This will be my first post on DevOps which is something that I, like many others dismissed a few years ago as something "only for developers". I was first introduced to infrastructure as code (IaC) in the form of ARM templates maybe 3 or 4 years ago and very quickly realised that I could … Continue reading Azure CI/CD with ARM templates and GitHub Actions

Are you migrating SQL Server virtual machines to Azure? If so, how are you handling the SQL licensing once migrated? If you are running SQL Server Standard or Enterprise edition then you need to have either an active software assurance agreement or a current CSP subscription for SQL Server in order to qualify for license … Continue reading Have you correctly licensed your migrated SQL Server VMs in Azure?

There are times when you may require a fixed outbound public IP address for your Internet facing workloads. Usually this is required for whitelisting purposes so that external systems or customers can safely trust the source of the traffic they are accepting. This is a straightforward enough process for a single virtual machine by using … Continue reading Outbound NAT for Azure Virtual Machines

Accelerated networking is something I've previously suggested in my 7 ways to optimize your Azure VM performance post. In short, this removes the virtual switch from the host allowing the NIC to forward network traffic directly to the virtual machine. The result of this is lower latency over the Virtual Network but it's important to … Continue reading Azure accelerated networking put to the test

I still see quite a number of SQL Server deployments on Azure Virtual Machines. Often this decision is driven by the application vendor and from my experience to date a PaaS alternative such as Azure SQL isn't a viable option purely because the vendor hasn't tested their application with this yet and therefore will not … Continue reading SQL Server Virtual Machine Disk Optimisation

I've been waiting for this one for a long time so I was very keen to get stuck in with a deployment as soon as the public preview was announced late last week. Firstly, why is this important? Although many of us have now migrated file based sharing solutions over to the likes of Sharepoint … Continue reading First look at Active Directory authentication over SMB for Azure Files (Preview)

I'm delighted to be kicking off Azure Spring Clean, a community event focused on Azure management best practices throughout the month of February. Many thanks to Joe Carlyle and Thomas Thornton for organising this event and allowing me to contribute. My contribution is all about best practices for Azure Role Based Access Control. This is … Continue reading Azure Spring Clean – RBAC Best Practices

First of all, what the heck is Hyper-threading? Well, in a nutshell Hyper-threading is a technology found on some Intel chips (AMD have their own equivalent technology) to improve multi-tasking by running tasks in parallel on the CPU. For most compute workloads multi-tasking is very common so Hyper-threading is usually very helpful and allows your … Continue reading Azure vCPUs and Hyper-threading

I had a curious issue this week that I could not explain for some time.  I eventually got to the bottom of it with some assistance from Azure Support and thought I would share some details in case anyone else comes across the same issue. The problem:  I had a couple of Virtual Machines in … Continue reading A lesson learned on outbound connections with Standard SKU Public IP Addresses

So rather than another blog post, this will be my first ever vlog post! I am proud to be one of 75 Azure community contributors to a series of training videos collectively known as Azure Advent Calendar. Throughout the month of December there will be three new videos posted each and every day right up … Continue reading Azure Advent Calendar 2019 – Azure Web Apps

I've been spending a lot more time recently working with Azure Monitor and Log Analytics. With Log Analytics you can not only monitor your Virtual Machine performance counter metrics but your Windows event logs as well. Something that I discovered is that although you can query the system and application Windows event logs you cannot … Continue reading Monitoring failed login attempts to your Azure Virtual Machines

Microsoft are always adding more features and configuration options that can be used for your Virtual Machine deployments and I find quite often some of these go under the radar at the time and get overlooked either for subsequent deployments or as options for optimizing existing deployments. I decided to put together a few options … Continue reading 7 ways to optimize your Azure VM performance

Microsoft recently announced a very useful preview feature that allows direct upload of VHD files to Azure as managed disks. This makes uploading images into Azure extremely straightforward. Potentially this can also be an option for migrating your VMs to Azure so long as you have a sufficient time window to allow for the on-premises … Continue reading Direct Upload to Azure Managed Disks

Ephemeral disks are something that have been in preview for a while now but have only very recently became generally available. If you look up the word ephemeral in the dictionary you will see it is defined as "something lasting for a very short time". Essentially what this means is that the disk is non-persistent … Continue reading Ephemeral OS Disks – what are they and when to use them

The archive tier feature of the storage account v2 is something that is gaining more and more attention from customers.  Why…because of the price and recently Microsoft announced a price reduction of up to 50% for some regions.  In addition to this there have been some new features launched which at the time of writing … Continue reading Uploading blobs direct to Azure archive tier storage

My first blog article isn’t going to be about a new feature but more something that I wanted to write about because I believe many customers who are using Azure are not aware of it. Many people think of Azure as its own self-contained world, and that it’s either running on Azure or it’s not.  … Continue reading Hybrid Cloud: Using Azure to secure and monitor on-premises systems