Copilot for Azure is an AI companion that simplifies how you design, operate, optimize, and troubleshoot apps and infrastructure from cloud to edge. With Copilot, gain new insights, discover more benefits of the cloud, and orchestrate data across both the cloud and the edge. Copilot AI assistance utilizes language models, the Azure control plane, and insights about your Azure and Arc–enabled assets. This is carried out within Azure’s steadfast commitment to safeguarding your data security and privacy. This article contains my own personal thoughts and experiences; make sure you approach this ..read more

When looking at your Dev/Test workloads in Azure, you may be considering the Azure Plan for Dev/Test Enterprise subscription type, available on both the Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) and Enterprise Agreement (EA) billing account types. Overview So, let us look at what this entails… You get Azure Plan for DevTest when you sign the Microsoft Customer Agreement. The Enterprise DevTest offer is available only to Enterprise Agreement customers, but they are essentially the same plan. The SKU value for Enterprise Dev/Test is: ms-azr-0148p and Azure Plan for Dev/Test Enterprise is: ms-azr-0148g ..read more

Azure Image Builder is an Azure managed service (running Packer underneath) that allows you to create customised Virtual Machine images. By using standardized virtual machine (VM) images, your organization can more easily migrate to the cloud and help ensure consistency in your deployments. Images ordinarily include predefined security, configuration settings, and any necessary software. Setting up your own imaging pipeline requires time, infrastructure, and many other details. With Azure VM Image Builder, you only need to create a configuration that describes your image and submit it to the ..read more

Book review of Azure Architecture Explained: A comprehensive guide to building effective cloud solutions Disclaimer: This is the first book review I have ever done, and this review is entirely my opinion and may not fully reflect the value you may or may not get from this book. Everyone will have their unique viewpoint and priorities of what they want out of a book, so please take my review as an opinionated view from my own viewpoint; I am, of course, happy to discuss different points of view and discussions on this page comments. We are all here to learn something! Book synopsis: “Azure i ..read more

Recently, I was deploying an User Assigned Managed identity, and assigning the managed identity a role assignment with Azure Bicep, and ran into an issue, where the assignment would fail, but then after a rerun would work. Principal e892476361114c90be141d9bf20cc94b does not exist in the directory 73160ae1-aa4a-48b5-a424-d5e43d808f53. Check that you have the correct principal ID. If you are creating this principal and then immediately assigning a role, this error might be related to a replication delay. In this case, set the role assignment principalType property to a value, such as ServicePri ..read more

When deploying Azure resources, it is crucial to configure alerts to ensure your resources’ health, performance, and security. By setting up alerts, you can proactively monitor your resources and take timely actions to address any issues that may arise. Here are the key reasons why configuring alerts is essential: Early detection of issues: Alerts enable you to identify potential problems or anomalies in your Azure resources at an early stage. By monitoring key metrics and logs, you can detect high CPU usage, low memory, network connectivity problems, or security breaches. This allows you t ..read more

You may have a situation where you have implemented Private endpoints and the traffic from on-premises to those Private Endpoints, either doesn’t work, even though on-premises firewalls say otherwise, or is working, but doesn’t appear in the Azure Firewall. I had this recently with Azure Arc, where the endpoints failed to connect once a site-to-site VPN connection (which was working) was replaced with an expressroute connection, but going through the Azure Firewall logs, was unable to see any 443 traffic for Arc, hitting the Firewall even when the connection was working. Traffic flow: Onpremi ..read more

When considering build agents to use in Azure DevOps (or GitHub), there are 2 main options to consider: Agent type Description Microsoft-hosted agents Agents hosted and managed by Microsoft Self-hosted agents Agents that you configure and manage, hosted on your VMs Microsoft-hosted agents, can be used for most things, but there are times where you may need to talk to internal company resources, or security is a concern, which is when you would consider self-hosting the agent yourself. Here is a table that summarizes the pros and cons of self-hosted Azure DevOps agents and Microsoft ..read more

This article is part of Azure Back to School - 2023 event! Make sure to check out the amazing content, created from the community! Along with the basics of the Azure Backup solutions, particularly on Virtual Machines running on Microsoft Azure, there have been a lot of changes in the last year, including Immutable vaults, enhanced policies, intelligence tiering, and cross-region restore. Introduction Let us start with the basics with a user story; what do we need to achieve: “As a Cloud Infrastructure Administrator at Contoso, I want to implement an automated backup solution for virtual mach ..read more

Deployment Stacks! What is it? insert confused look Maybe you have been browsing the Microsoft Azure Portal and noticed a new section in the management blade called: Deployment stacks and wondered what it was, and how you can use it. Let us take a look! Before we get started its worth noting that as of the time of this article, this feature is under Public Preview. Features or ways of working with Deployment Stacks may change, when it becomes generally available. If you run into issues, make sure you have a look at the current known issues. Overview Azure Deployment Stacks are a type of Azu ..read more