SQL Server 2022 is finally GA and one of the features I was most expecting is finally available. It’s the allows Azure AD Authentication. Azure AD users can access SQL Server directly, without a second user account. SQL Server on premises requires Azure ARC to be integrated to Azure. Azure VMs, on the other hand, … Read more
Synapse is a great data lake house tool. This means in a single tool we have resources to manage a data lake and data warehouse. The Synapse Serverless Pool is great to manage data lakes and for a great price: around us$ 5,00 for each TB of data queried. This makes it a great choice. … Read more
The app services in the title can be function apps, web apps or more. We can deploy the app services on the native app service environment provided by Microsoft or using containers. What’s the different between using the native environment or using containers? The differences aren’t many and it’s not easy to identify when it’s … Read more
The Auto-Shutdown policy is another important policy to ensure our virtual machines don’t expend more than what we planned for them. If we have a time window to use the virtual machines, the auto-shutdown policy can deactivate them at the right time. We need to discover the deep internal details about the auto-shutdown configuration before … Read more
Blueprints are (or should be) an important feature for Azure Cloud provisioning. Probably you already know about ARM templates. We can say they are the basic notation for deployment in Azure. But what happens when we need to deploy multiple items at once? Here are some options: Build everything in a single ARM template, what … Read more
Azure Cloudshell uses PowerShell 7.2.1. However, Powershell 7.2.2 is already available and we have also a PowerShell version 7.3.0 in preview. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could update the powershell version in cloudshell, instead of waiting for Microsoft? This would allow you to run scripts using the new features of the updated versions. Before … Read more
*Update at the end Azure Storage Policies are around for some time already, but they manage to stay unnoticed. This feature is very powerful and few people know about it. Probably you already know about Storage Keys and Shared Access Security. It’s important to highlight one limitation: Once we generate a SAS key, we can’t … Read more
I believe I’m not alone on this feeling: It seems like every time we use the Azure Portal some new feature appear. The features reproduce themselves faster than rabbits. Did you had this feeling before? Share your thoughts in the comments. This week, working with Azure, I found some new small features around and decided … Read more
I wrote many blogs about policies in Azure. First, I started talking about How essential Policies are. After that, I included them in a blog about Azure SQL AD Only Authentication and finally about how to ensure Azure SQL is with Azure AD Only Authentication enabled. Using both, policies and management groups, we can manage … Read more
MFA and conditional access policies are powerful tools for our cloud security, but they are full of tricks. I don’t pretend to cover the basics here. You know you can create conditional access policies to request MFA authentication from the users. You also know the fact the default configuration (which you should avoid) will request … Read more
A silly mistake, a site recovery error and a troubleshooting case study, let’s check how it happened. I was demonstrating Site Recovery in a training. Site recovery is a slow task, so I make the demonstration among other explanations, put the demonstration in the middle of other subjects. This also doesn’t leave much room to … Read more
Microsoft has made it possible to integrate Azure Active Directory with Virtual Machines. In this post, Dennes Torres walks you through the steps to set it up. … Read more
Some time ago I wrote a blog about the just released feature to allow only Azure Authentication in Azure SQL Databases. On that blog, I explained not only about the feature, but how to use Azure Policies, a great feature for governance, to control which Azure SQL are correctly configured and which is not, … Read more
Dynamic data mask is a very interesting security feature allowing us to mask critical fields such as e-mail, phone number, credit card and so on. We can decide what users will be able to see the value of these features or not. This feature faced many flaws when it was released, but I believe it’s … Read more
Saying that I’m from the time of the MDAC would be to break the main rule of never reveal our age. However, who really remembers Microsoft Data Access Components – MDAC – today ? Microsoft had ODBC and it was good. Out of the blue came Borland with a thing called BDE that was way … Read more
Azure is part of the Microsoft Global Network. Applications in the Azure environment can receive access from the entire world. This world-wide access creates a dilemma about the routing to the Azure services. We face two options: routing through Microsoft Global Network or through public internet. Initially only the Storage Accounts had a direct configuration … Read more
Resource groups and subscriptions sometimes are not enough to organize the content of our Azure Portal. I was preparing for a presentation and looking into a lot of resource groups, but during the presentation only a few of them should appear for me. How could I control this? The need is the mother of the … Read more
Recently a new feature appeared in Azure Portal, an ARM Template Visualizer, capable to show a graphic view of the resources inside an ARM template. The feature appears as a new button in screens where we are editing or downloading templates. These are some of the screens where you will see the new button: When … Read more
Infrastructure as code is evolving in large steps to improve the way we build and manage cloud infrastructure. ARM templates is the Azure way to code the infrastructure, besides the fact it’s evolving towards BICEP. Since January, a new feature to manage ARM templates is being tested and made available in Azure Portal: ARM Template … Read more
1 – Azure Hybrid Benefit Azure services related to servers and direct infrastructure reservation require software licenses, such as Windows Server and SQL Server. Microsoft offers what’s called Hybrid Benefit. When the software license is required, the service provisioning process asks if you would like to use the hybrid benefit. If you already have on … Read more
