JOIN Microsoft Ignite 2021 Event
You don’t want to miss this Live Awesome Virtual Global Event of Microsoft 😉
Category Archives: AzureDevOps
Dapr for .NET Developers E-book #microservices #dotnet #Dapr #Kubernetes #Azure #DevOps #developers
Dapr is an open source, portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, microservice, stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge. Dapr enables developers to focus on writing business logic and not solving distributed system challenges, thereby significantly improving their productivity, and reducing development time. Dapr lowers the bar for entry to build modern cloud native applications based on a microservices architecture and with this v1.0 release, Dapr applications can be deployed to self-hosted infrastructure or Kubernetes clusters in production scenarios.
Here you find an E-book about Dapr for .NET Developers
Foreword by Mark Russinovich Azure CTO and Technical Fellow Microsoft
With the wave of cloud adoption well underway, there is a major shift happening towards “cloud native” development, often built with microservice-architectures. These microservices are both stateless and stateful, and run on the cloud and edge, embracing the diversity of languages and frameworks available today. This enterprise shift is driven by both the market forces of faster time to market, as well as the scale and efficiencies of building services for the cloud. Even before COVID-19, cloud adoption was accelerating for enterprises and developers were being asked to do even more to deliver on building these distributed system applications, and that has only accelerated since. Developers in enterprises seek to focus on business logic, while leaning on platforms to imbue their applications with scale, resiliency, maintainability, elasticity, and the other attributes of cloud-native architectures, which is why there is also shift towards serverless platforms that hide the underlying infrastructure. Developers should not be expected to become distributed systems experts. This is where Dapr steps in to help you, whether you are building on infrastructure such as Kubernetes, or on a serverless platform.
Dapr is designed as an enterprise, developer-focused, microservices programming model platform with the mantra “any language, any framework, run anywhere”. It makes building distributed applications easy and portable across any infrastructure, from public-cloud, through hierarchical edge, and even down to single node IoT devices. It emerged from both our experiences building services in Azure as well as time spent working with customers building applications on Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Service Fabric. Over and over, we saw common problems that they had to address. It became clear that there was a need to provide a “library” of common microservice best practices that developers could use, not only in new greenfield applications, but also to aid in the modernization of existing applications. In the containerized, distributed, and networked cloud native world, the sidecar model has emerged as the preferred approach, in the same way DLLs are preferred in the client/server generation. Using Dapr’s sidecar and APIs give you, as a developer, all the power of distributed systems functionality, with the ease of a single HTTP or gRPC local call.
To address the wide range of scenarios that developers face, Dapr provides features such as state management, service to service invocation, pub/sub and integration to external systems with I/O bindings, which are based on the triggers and bindings of Azure Functions. These in turn take advantage of Dapr’s component model which allows you to “swap out”, say different underlying state stores, without having to change any code, making code more portable, more flexible and allowing for experimentation of what best suits your needs. Developers don’t need to learn and incorporate service SDKs into their code, worry about authentication, secret management, retries or conditional code that targets specific deployment environments.
This book shows how Dapr reduces your development time and overall code maintenance by incrementally “Daperizing” the canonical .NET reference application, eShop. For example, in the original eShop implementation, significant amounts of code were written to abstract between Azure Service Bus and RabbitMQ for publishing events between services. All this code can be discarded and simply replaced with Dapr’s pub/sub API and component model which had an even wider range of pub/sub brokers, rather than just two. Dapr’s actor model, when used in the reworked eShop application, shows the ease of building long running, stateful, event driven, workflow applications with all the difficulties of concurrency and multi-threading removed. By the end of this book, you will see the drastic simplification that Dapr brings to your application development, and I firmly believe all developers embarking on a cloud native app building journey should leverage Dapr.
We publicly announced Dapr with the v0.1 release in Oct 2019 and now, a year and half later, I am thrilled to say that Dapr is ready for production usage with the v1.0 release. Getting Dapr to v1.0 has truly been a community effort. It has been amazing to see the open-source community coalesce around Dapr and grow since it was first announced – from 114 contributors in October 2019 to over 700 in early 2021 – a six-fold increase in 16 months! Contributions to the project have gone to every Dapr repo and have ranged from opening issues, commenting on feature proposals, providing samples, and of course contributing code. The parts of the project community members have contributed to the most include the Dapr runtime, docs, CLI, SDKs and the creation of a rich ecosystem of components. Maintaining this openness is critical to Dapr’s future.
Dapr is really just getting started, though, and you should expect to see more Dapr capabilities and more support for Dapr in Azure services. I hope that you will take advantage of Dapr to enable you to focus on your core business logic and accelerate your microservices development. I am are excited to have you join us in the Dapr community on this journey at https://github.com/dapr/ and on Discord https://aka.ms/dapr-discord.
Modern distributed systems are complex. You start with small, loosely coupled, independently deployable services. These services cross process and server boundaries. They then consume different kinds of infrastructure backing services (databases, message brokers, key vaults). Finally, these disparate pieces compose together to form an application.
Mark Russinovich Azure CTO and Technical Fellow Microsoft
Thank you Author; Rob Vettor, Sander Molenkamp and Edwin van Wijk for this Awesome E-book 😉
Get Started with the #Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer #AzOps #Azure #Cloud #Storage
Upload, download, and manage Azure blobs, files, queues, and tables, as well as Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Data Lake Storage entities. Easily access virtual machine disks, and work with either Azure Resource Manager or classic storage accounts. Manage and configure cross-origin resource sharing rules.
Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer
The Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer App is standalone and available for Windows, Linux and MacOS operating systems.
Here you find the Prerequisites and the Download files for Azure Storage Explorer.
Here you see how easy it is to create a snapshot before you begin with a Installation on the Azure Virtual Machine.
Create a Snapshot
Give the Snapshot a Name and select the Resource Group.
Snapshot Created Successfully 😉
When you open the Azure Portal and search for snapshots :
Phantom OS Disk with a Full Snapshot.
Azure Storage Explorer Emulator for Developers
Azurite open source Azure Storage API compatible server (emulator)
Azurite is an open source Azure Storage API compatible server (emulator). Based on Node.js, Azurite provides cross platform experiences for customers wanting to try Azure Storage easily in a local environment. Azurite simulates most of the commands supported by Azure Storage with minimal dependencies.
Azurite V2 is manually created with pure JavaScript, popular and active as an open source project. However, Azure Storage APIs are growing and keeping updating, manually keeping Azurite up to date is not efficient and prone to bugs. JavaScript also lacks strong type validation which prevents easy collaboration.
Compared to V2, Azurite V3 implements a new architecture leveraging code generated by a TypeScript Server Code Generator we created. The generator uses the same swagger (modified) used by the new Azure Storage SDKs. This reduces manual effort and facilitates better code alignment with storage APIs.
3.0.0-preview is the first release version using Azurite’s new architecture.
Features & Key Changes in Azurite V3
- Blob storage features align with Azure Storage API version 2020-04-08 (Refer to support matrix section below)
- SharedKey/Account SAS/Service SAS/Public Access Authentications
- Get/Set Blob Service Properties
- Create/List/Delete Containers
- Create/Read/List/Update/Delete Block Blobs
- Create/Read/List/Update/Delete Page Blobs
- Queue storage features align with Azure Storage API version 2020-04-08 (Refer to support matrix section below)
- SharedKey/Account SAS/Service SAS
- Get/Set Queue Service Properties
- Preflight Request
- Create/List/Delete Queues
- Put/Get/Peek/Updata/Deleta/Clear Messages
- Features NEW on V3
- Built with TypeScript and ECMA native promise and async features
- New architecture based on TypeScript server generator. Leverage auto generated protocol layer, models, serializer, deserializer and handler interfaces from REST API swagger
- Flexible structure and architecture, supports customizing handler layer implementation, persistency layer implementation, HTTP pipeline middleware injection
- Detailed debugging log support, easy bug locating and reporting
- Works with storage .Net SDK basic and advanced sample
- SharedKey, AccountSAS, ServiceSAS, OAuth, Public Access authentication support
- Keep updating with latest Azure Storage API version features (Refer to support matrix)
Introducing the ADF Azure Storage Explorer Extension
Azure Data Factory extension for Storage Explorer
Conclusion
Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer tool can make your life easier to do your Azure Storage Management. Copy – Paste data is a Great and handy feature for Administrators.
Hope this is useful and go try it yourself.
Running #Dapr in WSL2 Ubuntu 20-04 distro in #WindowsInsider Build 21277 RS and #VSCode
Working with Dapr in WSL2 Remote VSCode and Ubuntu 20.04 distro
Dapr is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for any developer to build resilient, stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.
Developer language SDKs and frameworks
To make using Dapr more natural for different languages, it also includes language specific SDKs for Go, Java, JavaScript, .NET and Python. These SDKs expose the functionality in the Dapr building blocks, such as saving state, publishing an event or creating an actor, through a typed, language API rather than calling the http/gRPC API. This enables you to write a combination of stateless and stateful functions and actors all in the language of their choice. And because these SDKs share the Dapr runtime, you get cross-language actor and functions support.
SDKs
Dapr in Standalone version.
I’m using Windows Insider Build version 21277-RS with Docker for Windows Edge and Visual Studio Code.
Docker for Windows Edge Version Running.
Because Docker for Windows Edge support WSL2 Engine and Visual Studio Code too, brought me to an idea to build dapr into Ubuntu 20.04 WSL Distro on my Windows Insiders 21277 RS version on my Surface Book 3. There for you must activate the WSL2 integration with my default WSL distro Ubuntu-20.04.
Docker for Windows WSL 2 Integration.
In your Ubuntu-20.04 WSL2 version, you can install Dapr into your linux distro, more information you find here on dapr.io
Dapr init ( in the Ubuntu-20.04 WSL2 Linux distro )
Here you find the Dapr dev environment installation types for Dapr init, I did the standalone version. Dapr makes then the following containers :
Dapr Containers.
Then we have the following running :
- Dapr Dashboard
- Zipkin
Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures. Features include both the collection and lookup of this data.
Zipkin Traces
Dapr Dashboard
Now we have Dapr running in the WSL2 Ubuntu-20.04 distro, you can use Visual Studio Code on Windows Insiders using Remote WSL and work with your favourite dapr SDK like the list above 😉
From here you can work with your dapr application.
In this guide dapr is running with Docker containers, but you can also install it on Kubernetes or K8s, AKS, Azure any where, see this overview :
Dapr with Kubenetes Containers.
Dapr Overview.
Important Note : Dapr is now production ready with version 1.0 ! Developers, DevOps, AzOps, you can start with it and Build and Test your own microservices and Container apps ! Hope you are having fun with it too 😉
Happy Holidays and I wish you a Healthy 2021 #Azure #Cloud #MVPBuzz #Winserv #Security #Healthcare
It’s a year full of misery with the Covid-19 virus around the world. People who lose their loved one, It’s a very sad time for all of us! Microsoft technologies are still going on strong with new features in Azure Cloud Services but also supporting the people who are working in the healthcare, data analytics, Microsoft Teams for Collaboration and much more. But what I want to say to all HealthCare people over the world : THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ALL THE WORK YOU DO 👍
I have deep respect for you all !
Community, Microsoft Product Teams, MVP Lead, WIndows Insiders, I wish you and your family happy holidays and a Healthy 2021 with lot of Success! 🎄😍
Deploying Azure Stack HCI Cluster with Windows Admin Center #WAC #AzureStackHCI #WindowsAdminCenter #Hyperv #AKS
Azure Stack HCI is a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) cluster solution that hosts virtualized Windows and Linux workloads and their storage in a hybrid on-premises environment. Azure hybrid services enhance the cluster with capabilities such as cloud-based monitoring, Site Recovery, and VM backups, as well as a central view of all of your Azure Stack HCI deployments in the Azure portal. You can manage the cluster with your existing tools including Windows Admin Center, System Center, and PowerShell.
Azure Stack HCI, version 20H2 is a new operating system now in Public Preview and available for download. It’s intended for on-premises clusters running virtualized workloads, with hybrid-cloud connections built-in. As such, Azure Stack HCI is delivered as an Azure service and billed on an Azure subscription. Azure Stack HCI also now includes the ability to host the Azure Kubernetes Service; for details, see Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI.
Get Started with Azure Stack HCI and Windows Admin Center
Windows Admin Center is a locally deployed, browser-based app for managing Azure Stack HCI. The simplest way to install Windows Admin Center is on a local management PC (desktop mode), although you can also install it on a server (service mode).
If you install Windows Admin Center on a server, tasks that require CredSSP, such as cluster creation and installing updates and extensions, require using an account that’s a member of the Gateway Administrators group on the Windows Admin Center server. For more information, see the first two sections of Configure User Access Control and Permissions.
Before you begin, you have to know that Azure Stack HCI is still in Preview and not for Production usage ready. But I’m installing it in my MVPLAB for testing purpose only and learn all the New Features.
What’s New in Azure Stack HCI
Clusters running Azure Stack HCI, version 20H2 have the following new features as compared to Windows Server 2019-based solutions:
- New capabilities in Windows Admin Center: With the ability to create and update hyper-converged clusters via an intuitive UI, Azure Stack HCI is easier than ever to use.
- Stretched clusters for automatic failover: Multi-site clustering with Storage Replica replication and automatic VM failover provides native disaster recovery and business continuity to clusters that use Storage Spaces Direct.
- Affinity and anti-affinity rules: These can be used similarly to how Azure uses Availability Zones to keep VMs and storage together or apart in clusters with multiple fault domains, such as stretched clusters.
- Azure portal integration: The Azure portal experience for Azure Stack HCI is designed to view all of your Azure Stack HCI clusters across the globe, with new features in development.
- GPU acceleration for high-performance workloads: AI/ML applications can benefit from boosting performance with GPUs.
- BitLocker encryption: You can now use BitLocker to encrypt the contents of data volumes on Azure Stack HCI, helping government and other customers stay compliant with standards such as FIPS 140-2 and HIPAA.
- Improved Storage Spaces Direct volume repair speed: Repair volumes quickly and seamlessly.
In the Following Step-by-Step guide we install Azure Stack HCI Cluster with Windows Admin Center.
Click on Add and then Create New Server Cluster.
Choose for Azure Stack HCI.
Here you can also choose for both Azure Stack HCI nodes are in the same Site or you have more Azure Stack HCI Nodes in Two Sites for disaster Recovery and Business Continuity.
In my MVPLAB I have all Azure Stack HCI nodes in One Site. More information about Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Stretching Clusters can be found here.
Prerequisites before you begin with Windows Admin Center wizard for Creating Azure Stack HCI Cluster.
This is what I like about Windows Admin Center, supporting you in all steps and choices for making an Azure Stack HCI Cluster with Storage Spaces Direct.
Specify your administrator Account and password and add the Azure Stack HCI Node Servers
Add the Nodes to the Domain.
Install Required Features on the Azure Stack HCI Node Servers
Install Updates on the Azure Stack HCI Node Servers
Here you get options from your hardware vendor
I don’t get this because it’s virtual.
Restart the Azure Stack HCI Node Servers and Click Next Networking
Networking adapters are UP and Running.
When you have Enough Nics in your Azure Stack HCI Node Server, you can choose here for a Teamed Management NIC.
I choose for a single management NIC.
Plan your Azure Stack HCI Node network
Configure your Production and Storage network
Here you can configure different Switches for your workloads.
Windows Admin Center will work with Software Defined Networking (SDN)
I Skipped this in my MVPLAB.
Before creating the Azure Stack HCI Cluster, we have to Validate the Cluster first.
When the Cluster Validation is done, you can download the Cluster Validation report.
Here we give the Cluster a Name and a static IP.
Click Create Cluster.
Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Cluster is created 😉
Click Next for Storage.
Click Next
I Got some small disks Click Next.
Storage is validated and suitable for Storage Spaces Direct.
Storage Spaces Direct is enabled on your Azure Stack HCI Cluster.
Click Next for SDN
Here you can configure the Network Controller for the Azure Stack HCI Cluster
Done your Azure Stack HCI Cluster is made 🙂
Here we have the Dashboard in Windows Admin Center of my Azure Stack HCI Cluster
Management of your Azure Stack HCI Cluster
Managing your Azure Stack HCI Cluster with Windows Admin Center is important, because I have connected WAC with my Azure Subscription I can use Azure Monitor.
From here the Cluster is also connected with my Analytics workspace of Azure Monitor.
Azure Stack HCI Cluster Nodes connected with Azure Monitor.
With Windows Admin Center you can manage the Azure Stack HCI updates with Cluster Aware Updating (CAU) without any downtime for your workloads.
Start Cluster Aware Updating
Click on Install
One Azure Stack HCI Node is waiting and the other is Installing.
Now the other Azure Stack HCI Node is Installing the Update.
Updates Succeeded on both Azure Stack HCI Nodes.
Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Cluster is Running
Create your Virtual Machine on Azure Stack HCI Cluster.
Conclusion
Windows Admin Center supports you all the way for making your Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Cluster in easy steps deployment wizard. Of course you can make also your own PowerShell deployment scripts when you have to make more Azure Stack HCI Clusters for different platforms like Deploying virtual machines or AKS Kubernetes Clusters for Container Applications or a SQL environment.
Here you find more information about PowerShell commands
After deploying Azure Stack HCI Clusters with your own PowerShell Script, you can add the Cluster into Windows Admin Center for IT Management.
The Installation time of the Cluster is really fast. I hope this will give you more inside information about the Preview of Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Cluster and Windows Admin Center better Together!
Next Step is AKS Kubernetes on Azure Stack HCI 😉
Start your DevOps pipeline in the Azure Cloud
This blogpost can support your DevOps journey to make your Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI CD) for companies and or customers.
People, Process, and Technology to continually provide value to customers.
While adopting DevOps practices automates and optimizes processes through technology, it all starts with the culture inside the organization—and the people who play a part in it. The challenge of cultivating a DevOps culture requires deep changes in the way people work and collaborate. But when organizations commit to a DevOps culture, they can create the environment for high-performing teams to develop.
My name is James van den Berg and I’m a MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management on my DevOps journey as an IT Infrastructure Guy managing datacenters on-prem and in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Today It’s not only a Virtual Machine or a Website to deploy for your customers, it’s much more then that like :
- Time to market, deploy your solution fast without waiting on dependencies because you automated your process with a CI CD Pipeline.
- Security and Monitoring to keep you in Controle.
- Working together with different Teams who are each responsible for a part of the solution.
- The complete DevOps Pipeline must be Compliant
Here you can start with Azure DevOps on Microsoft Learn platform.
Read More on the Microsoft Tech Community about the step-by-step guide, you will see how easy it can be to Build your own first pipeline!
JOIN #Microsoft Inspire 2020 Global Event July 21-22 #MSInspire #Azure #AzureStack #Cloud #MVPBuzz #Innovation
Microsoft Inspire 2020 Global Event 🚀
Innovation. Leadership. Partnership.
Now is the time. Join your global partner community for the Microsoft Inspire digital event experience. Register today and get ready to extend your partner network as we explore what’s coming in the year ahead and work together to find shared solutions for our customers. Join Microsoft Inspire 2020 Global Event on July 21-22 Now at no Cost!
You will be Inspired by Microsoft New Technologies and Innovations !
Inside Azure Management E-Book Available ! #Azure #MVPBuzz #Management #Cloud
Inside Azure Management
This Inside Azure Management E-Book is a Must Have for All Azure Cloud Administrators! It’s made by Great Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVP’s)
who are working always with Microsoft Azure Cloud Services. You can download this Awesome Inside Azure Management E-Book here.
If you want a hard copy of this Awesome E-Book you can order at Amazon
Here you can find the Authors of the Inside Azure Management E-Book on GitHub.
Thank you Guys for Sharing this with the Community 👍😎🚀
#Microsoft Build 2020 Virtual Event May 19-20-21 Build your Schedule Now! #MSBuild #MVPBuzz
Microsoft Build 2020
Choose from 48 hours of continuous content to create your own digital event experience. Registration is free and is required to get full, interactive access to the digital event. Here you can register for Microsoft Build 2020 Virtual Event
The Session Catalog is Live ! Build your own Schedule here
With 30+ Community talks, learning sessions, and skill-building activities exploring Minecraft, MakeCode, Visual Studio, AI, Azure, and more, there is something here for every student and every level of experience!
Check out the full list here or search by keyword to add lessons to your schedule.
Don’t miss this Awesome Event 👍😎🚀
