I wrote about my experiences and challenges when building a secure remote access solution for Azure-based virtual machines back in February 2019. It’s one of my more popular posts in this blog, and I guess it’s helpful for many because it travels through the options and provides justification for the choices. As that’s often one… Read More »Building a secure remote access solution using Azure Bastion Host
Today, Microsoft announced that Azure Sentinel is now Generally Available (GA). What this means, is that Azure Sentinel can be used in production, the pricing has been revealed and it’s stable for enterprise-grade usage. In this post, I’ll have a look at what Azure Sentinel is, how to get started and what to keep an… Read More »Understanding and getting started with Azure Sentinel
I have several Amazon Kindle reading devices. The one that I use – almost daily – is the Kindle Oasis, from last year. Battery life is insane, as in “it’s never empty”, and rarely needs a recharge. Perhaps I’m not using it enough. I traded in my old and beaten Kindle from 2015 for this,… Read More »Building an automated pipeline to keep my Amazon Kindle full of interesting content
Every evening I read a book to my youngest son. He’s turning 2 later this year and loves books. Or perhaps it’s just his way of buying more time before going to sleep. We started with Astrophysics for Babies, back in 2018. Since then, we’ve read Newtonian Physics for Babies, Rocket Science for Babies, General… Read More »Challenging myself with Microsoft’s Quantum Computing development tools and Q#
This week has been very productive for me. I’ve been running and thinking, and in the mornings I’ve written about my thoughts. Today is no different! I’ve been a Twitter user for 10 years now – I joined in May 2009. At first, I was a passive user, but in recent years I’ve given it… Read More »Building a custom Twitter Analytics tool using .NET Core, Azure Storage, and Power BI
It’s that time again! And by this I mean I was thinking of grabbing a cup of coffee, splashing out a few lines of code and have something useful come out. The way I seem to make learning easier for me is to build something. Many times when I’m in the middle of debugging some… Read More »Building my own RSS feed generator using .NET Core and the new System.Text.Json assembly
I’m still partially on vacation mode, as school and other obligations won’t resume until next week. The fun part about the Finnish summer holidays is that the whole country essentially shuts down and hibernates for 6 weeks. This provides a nice way to think about other stuff than work, as customers and colleagues are mostly… Read More »Building a command-line utility using .NET Core and C# to track my car
Yesterday, Microsoft announced Azure Lighthouse. This post will walk you through what the service is, what benefits it brings, and why you should start using it. What is Azure Lighthouse? Azure Lighthouse is a new service from Microsoft, released on July 11th, 2019. It brings better management capabilities and flexibility for managing multiple Azure tenants… Read More »Azure Lighthouse – managing customer Azure tenants as a Service Provider
The Raspberry Pi organization announced Raspberry Pi 4 just a few weeks ago. I had to get one, and after placing an order, I received my RPi4 in only a few days. It’s a powerful little computer, with 4 GB of RAM and dual-HDMI outputs. It powers through USB-C, which is an excellent addition. I… Read More »Building a Raspberry Pi 4-based weather monitoring solution using Ruuvitag sensors, Azure IoT Hub and Azure Functions
I’m currently running my blog (the one you’re reading, thanks!) in Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. For the longest of times — which is maybe five years — I ran multiple WordPress sites in Azure using the PaaS offering. This includes the Azure Marketplace-based template, that provisions a Web App and MySQL database with a few… Read More »Running a static site in Microsoft Azure using WordPress for content management
Almost exactly a year ago I blogged about building a simple and secure DNS updater for Azure DNS using PowerShell. If you didn’t read that post, it’s a solution for keeping my dynamic IP updated with a static DNS name using a little bit of automation from PowerShell. This tool is useful for when I… Read More »Building a simple and secure DNS updater for Azure DNS using Raspberry Pi and Azure Functions
I think I’ve written once or twice I’m a great fan of building Proof of Concepts and prototypes. This allows me to rapidly learn without fear or risk of failing in front of an important customer. And all customers who pay for your time are important, of course. I’ve long admired the fantastic AKA.MS short… Read More »Tracking, resolving, storing and presenting AKA.MS short links from social media using Serverless capabilities in Azure
In my previous blog post, I wrote about the Oura Ring and how it tracks my wellness and activities. As part of the service Oura provides there’s also a comprehensive API that can be leveraged for your own purposes. As the data that is being tracked is very personal (“hmm, I wonder why Jussi is… Read More »Building a custom connector for Power BI that supports OAuth2 to visualize my wellness data
I sometimes find myself struggling with a technical issue that I just can’t seem to resolve in a timely manner. Over the years I’ve learned that once you’ve spent maybe 15 to 30 minutes troubleshooting without any noticeable progress, there’s only two things that will help you: a huge cup of fresh coffee or working… Read More »Fun with Azure Functions: Building a lookup tool for Azure AD tenant IDs
“This is a quick one”, I thought. A customer asked me to have a look at their old CRM environment, that was running in a local physical server in their datacenter. The plan was to decommission the server, but rescue the CRM database. I knew I could lift-and-shift the database or databases to Azure SQL… Read More »Migrating SQL Server 2008 databases to Azure SQL