I recently overhauled a script that I wrote to take advantage of the parallel processing functionality that is included in Microsoft Powershell 7. The results have been excellent with script runtimes being reduced from over an hour down to roughly 5 minutes. Learning the ins-and-outs of using parallel processing was a bit of a chore that I will discuss in a later article, however the first hurdle that had to be mounted was simply getting Powershell 7 installed and figuring out how to make use of it. Quickly getting up and running with Powershell 7 is what this article seeks to address. (more…)
Let me start by saying, I really love Microsoft Azure and my brain is currently flooded with plenty of Azure goodness after earning my Azure Admin certification. Therefore I was surprised to find myself working on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) platform less than a week after passing the AZ-104. I find that my professional life is focused on Microsoft, Windows Server, Hyper-V, Powershell, IIS, Storage Spaces, etc. but the technical tinkerer in me is always working in the world of Linux. Additionally, my personal pet projects have personal pet budgets. So that means Apache, MySQL, PHP, BASH, Drupal, and WordPress.
I also delight in most things open-source. The first time I SSH’d into my hacked Western Digital “WDTV” media player well over a decade ago I was enchanted by the incredible things that can be done with Linux on not-so-incredible hardware and non-existent budgets.
Had you told me a month ago this blog would be running on Oracle hosted infrastructure supported by hardware released within the last three years I believe I would have laughed. First, I am familiar with Azure and genuinely like the platform. Second, “Oracle” and “Budget” are typically diametrically opposed concepts. And yet… here we (literally) are.
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I periodically review Azure PaaS resource edge security. As a part of that process I examine and cleanup AzureSQL firewall rules. Once you have more than a handful of subscriptions and AzureSQL databases, doing this manually starts becoming unfeasible. To that end, Azure Powershell is your friend…
As is typical, you need to install the Powershell AZ module on your workstation, after that you need to run.
Connect-AzAccount
Then supply your Azure credentials (preferably creds that have the ability to view and manage all of your AzureSQL databases and firewall rules, otherwise the rest is moot.
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When your business hinges upon remote workers and remote offices, secure connections, and lots of data manipulation… how do you deal with some of your folks being extra remote? Granted the internet in 2020 is very different from the internet in say 2008 and the world has grown ever smaller as a result… but distance and all of the congested, intervening, network hops that come with it are still a reality. Particularly for remote workers living on other continents that have to interface regularly with systems in the United States as a part of their job.
The two big headaches for remote workers in other countries connecting to offices in the US are latency and bandwidth. In the past there were only and handful of solutions, most involving long-term contracts with a telcom and lengthy, complicated setups. I would argue that MPLS still falls squarely in this camp. SD-WAN has certainly improved on all of the above but it’s still enough of a headache that it typically involves contract terms and conversations with sales “engineers.”
I would like to propose something different using Azure.
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The current state of the world has caused some unique stresses on IT infrastructure. For IT departments servicing internal teams, remote access infrastructure in particular has felt the brunt of the blow. To that end, I spent a couple of weeks testing out enterprise VPN solutions.
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