First of all Thank you for following me and Sharing Microsoft Cloud and Datacenter Management content on Social Media 🙂 Sharing & Learning Together is Better.
Welcome 577 New Followers on Twitter of the 5904 Followers 🙂
More then 2.807.000 Tweet impressions in One year !
Started with Friday is MVPbuzz Day for Education to get Azure Cloud in the Classroom, working together with Teachers and Students in my Free time.
Working with Microsoft Learn in Teams for the Students.
Meetings and Speaking for Education, all about Azure and AzureStack Technologies.
Conferences, like the Global MVP Summit 2018, DevOps Amsterdam, Community Group meetings.
Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Build, Microsoft Connect events.
Almost every week Microsoft Product Group Intervention (PGI) sessions Online.
Sharing the News every Day via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft Tech Community, Blog
But what is coming in 2019 ?
Rocking with Azure in the Classroom !
I will continue every day sharing knowledge with the Community and continue my Free work on MVPbuzz Friday for Education to get Azure Cloud Technology in the Classroom for Teachers and Students.
The trend I see for 2019 is more Infrastructure and Security by Code with Microsoft Azure DevOps
and of course you have to be in Control with Microsoft Azure Monitor
I will write a blogpost in January 2019 about Microsoft Azure Hub-Spoke model by Enterprise Design 4 of 4: Optimize your Azure Workload.
More Items in 2019 to come :
Microsoft Azure Security Center for Hybrid IT
Windows Server 2019 in combination with Azure Cloud Services.
More on Containers in the Cloud
Azure Stack and ASDK
Integration with Azure Cloud.
API Management
Azure DevOps Pipelines and Collabration
Azure IoT for Smart Cities and Buildings combined with AI Technology
2019 will be a Great year again with New Microsoft Technologies and Features for your business.
Azure DevOps Services is a cloud service for collaborating on code development. It provides an integrated set of features that you access through your web browser or IDE client. The features are included, as follows:
Git repositories for source control of your code
Build and release services to support continuous integration and delivery of your apps
Agile tools to support planning and tracking your work, code defects, and issues using Kanban and Scrum methods
Many tools to test your apps, including manual/exploratory testing, load testing, and continuous testing
Highly customizable dashboards for sharing progress and trends
Built-in wiki for sharing information with your team
The Azure DevOps ecosystem also provides support for adding extensions and integrating with other popular services, such as: Campfire, Slack, Trello, UserVoice, and more, and developing your own custom extensions.
Azure Monitor for containers is a feature designed to monitor the performance of container workloads deployed to either Azure Container Instances or managed Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Monitoring your containers is critical, especially when you’re running a production cluster, at scale, with multiple applications.
Azure Monitor for containers gives you performance visibility by collecting memory and processor metrics from controllers, nodes, and containers that are available in Kubernetes through the Metrics API. Container logs are also collected. After you enable monitoring from Kubernetes clusters, these metrics and logs are automatically collected for you through a containerized version of the Log Analytics agent for Linux and stored in your Log Analytics workspace.
What I really like is that you now can see the Container Live logs from the Azure portal and see what is going on in the background of a Container 🙂
Activate Azure Kubernetes Container Live Logs
Here you see the Container Live logs
This feature provides a real-time view into your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) container logs (stdout/stderr) without having to run kubectl commands. When you select this option, new pane appears below the containers performance data table on the Containers view, and it shows live logging generated by the container engine to further assist in troubleshooting issues in real time.
Live logs supports three different methods to control access to the logs:
AKS without Kubernetes RBAC authorization enabled
AKS enabled with Kubernetes RBAC authorization
AKS enabled with Azure Active Directory (AD) SAML based single-sign on
You even can search in the Container Live Logs for Troubleshooting and history :
Search on ssh
Azure Monitor for containers uses a containerized version of the Log Analytics agent for Linux. After initial deployment, there are routine or optional tasks you may need to perform during its lifecycle.
Because of this agent you can work with Log Analytics in Azure Monitor :
When you have your production workload running on Azure Kubernetes Clusters, It’s important to monitor to keep you in Control of the solution in Microsoft Azure and watch for improvements like performance for the business. With Container Live logs you can see what is going on in the Containers when you have issues and that’s great for troubleshooting to get your problem solved fast. Get your workload into Azure Containers and make your Azure DevOps CI/CD Pipelines in the Cloud.
When you are implementing your Microsoft Azure Design like a HUB-Spoke model you have to deal with security of your Azure environment (Virtual Datacenter). One of them are Network Security Groups to protect your Virtual networks and make communication between Azure subnets possible in a Secure Azure Virtual Datacenter.
You really have to plan your Azure Virtual networks and implement it by Architectural Design. Now I’m writing about Azure Network Security Groups which is important, but there are more items to deal with like :
Naming Conventions in your Azure Virtual Datacenter
Azure Subscriptions ( who is Owner, Contributor, or Reader? )
Azure Regions ( Where is my Datacenter in the world? )
Azure VNET and Sub-Nets ( IP-addresses )
Security of your Virtual Networks ( Traffic filtering, Routing )
How to Manage Microsoft Azure Network Security Groups (NSG) ?
IMPORTANT: Before you start with Azure Network Security Groups, test every ARM JSON Script first in your Dev-Test Azure Subscription before you do production. Talk with your Cloud Administrators, because when you implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and work with ARM Templates you can delete manual settings in NSG’s for example, which will give you troubles like no protocol communication between subnets.
When you start new in Microsoft Azure, It’s easy to make your Azure security baseline for all of your Network Security Groups (NSG’s) by Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates.
When you have a Microsoft Azure HUB-Spoke model with for example four Azure Subscriptions and a lot of Azure Virtual Networks – Subnets, you got a lot of NSG’s to manage and you don’t want to manage those manually. So there are different ways to manage Azure Network Security Groups via ARM Templates. For example :
ARM Templates from the Azure Portal
Make your ARM Baseline template.
Edit your parameters and Deploy.
Here you saw a standard Virtual Machine Deployment, but you can add of course all of your Azure Resource Manager templates here including your NSG Base Line template. In this way your deployments are documented ( Scripts).
Azure DevOps Services is a cloud service for collaborating on code development. It provides an integrated set of features that you access through your web browser or IDE client. The features are included, as follows:
Git repositories for source control of your code
Build and release services to support continuous integration and delivery of your apps
Agile tools to support planning and tracking your work, code defects, and issues using Kanban and Scrum methods
Many tools to test your apps, including manual/exploratory testing, load testing, and continuous testing
Highly customizable dashboards for sharing progress and trends
Built-in wiki for sharing information with your team
The Azure DevOps ecosystem also provides support for adding extensions and integrating with other popular services, such as: Campfire, Slack, Trello, UserVoice, and more, and developing your own custom extensions.
Choose Azure DevOps Services when you want the following results:
Quick set up
Maintenance-free operations
Easy collaboration across domains
Elastic scale
Rock-solid security
You’ll also have access to cloud load testing, cloud build servers, and application insights.
Azure DevOps Repo for your Templates
From here you can make your Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Pipelines together with your Cloud Administrator Team 😉
When you have your Azure DevOps Private Repository in place and you like to work with Visual Studio for example, you can connect to your Repo and Check-in your NSG ARM Script but Deploy with Visual Studio to your Azure Virtual Datacenter.
So you see there are enough ways to deploy ARM Templates and this is not all, because you can also use Azure Cloudshell for example or other CLI command-line interfaces. But now we want to set the NSG Baseline for our Azure Subscription. A good start is to see the possibilities in the JSON scripting for Network Security Groups. Here you find the settings and explanation of Azure Components.
By Default is Internet available in a NSG ! So here you see that Internet is not allowed only the AzureCloud West Europe resources because some Azure SDK Component work via ” Public internet” ( Microsoft IP-Addresses). (RDP protocol is marked and not set in this example for Security reasons)
Internet by Default Rules, so you must set your security Rules !
Conclusion :
You really have to implement Azure Security by Design, make your Base-line with ARM Templates in a Private Repo for your Azure Network Security Groups with the Correct RBAC Configuration for your Cloud Administrator Team. Don’t make them manually and do settings manually when you have a lot of NSG’s ! Versions of your ARM templates are documented in your Repository 😉
Test Always first in a Dev-Test Azure Subscription or in Azure DevOps with a Test plan before you implement in Production.
Collaborative software development tools for the entire team
Previously known as Team Foundation Server (TFS), Azure DevOps Server is a set of collaborative software development tools, hosted on-premises. Azure DevOps Server integrates with your existing IDE or editor, enabling your cross-functional team to work effectively on projects of all sizes.
With container support, customers can use Azure’s intelligent Cognitive Services capabilities, wherever the data resides. This means customers can perform facial recognition, OCR, or text analytics operations without sending their content to the cloud. Their intelligent apps are portable and scale with greater consistency whether they run on the edge or in Azure.
Get started with these Azure Cognitive Services Containers
Building solutions with machine learning often requires a data scientist. Azure Cognitive Services enable organizations to take advantage of AI with developers, without requiring a data scientist. We do this by taking the machine learning models and the pipelines and the infrastructure needed to build a model and packaging it up into a Cognitive Service for vision, speech, search, text processing, language understanding, and more. This makes it possible for anyone who can write a program, to now use machine learning to improve an application. However, many enterprises still face challenges building large-scale AI systems. Today Microsoft announced container support for Cognitive Services, making it significantly easier for developers to build ML-driven solutions.
You must first complete and submit the Cognitive Services Vision Containers Request form to request access to the Face container. The form requests information about you, your company, and the user scenario for which you’ll use the container. Once submitted, the Azure Cognitive Services team reviews the form to ensure that you meet the criteria for access to the private container registry.
Important !
You must use an email address associated with either a Microsoft Account (MSA) or Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) account in the form. If your request is approved, you then receive an email with instructions describing how to obtain your credentials and access the private container registry.
The Face container uses a common configuration framework, so that you can easily configure and manage storage, logging and telemetry, and security settings for your containers.
Configuration settings
Configuration settings in the Face container are hierarchical, and all containers use a shared hierarchy, based on the following top-level structure:
End-to-end Pipelines for Automating Microsoft Azure Deployments
Overview :
Imagine a fully automated, end-to-end pipeline for your cloud deployments—one that encompasses and automates everything:
• Source code repos.
• The build and release iterations.
• Agile processes supported by continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD)
• Security and governance.
• Business unit chargebacks.
• Support and maintenance.
Azure services and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) make control plane automation very achievable. Many enterprise IT groups dream of creating or unifying their disparate automation processes and supporting a common, enterprise-wide datacenter control plane in the cloud that is integrated with their existing or new DevOps workflows. Their development environments may use Jenkins, Azure DevOps Services (formerly Visual Studio Team Services), Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS), Atlassian, or other services. The challenge is to automate beyond the CI/CD pipeline to the management and policy layers. From a planning and architecture standpoint, it can seem like an overwhelming program of interdependent systems and processes. This guide outlines a planning process that you can use for automated support of your cloud deployments and DevOps workflows beyond the CI/CD pipeline. The Azure platform provides services you can use, or you can choose to work with third-party or open source options. The process is based on real-world examples that we have deployed with enterprise customers on Azure.
This whitepaper was authored by Tim Ehlen. It was edited by Nanette Ray. It was reviewed by AzureCAT.
Rocking with Azure in the Classroom !
