The Technology Chronicle

 Azure backup offers a comprehensive cloud based  hybrid backup solution that enables backup of not only your Azure VMs, but your files, folders, applications etc both on prem and in Azure. This solution can be used to replace your chunky on-prem backup solutions,  tape drives , backup tapes and the likes. In this blog, I will give a brief overview of the Azure backup service, its advantages and scenarios that it can cater to currently Service highlights: Azure backup is offered as a complete backup as a service offering. Lets take a look at few highlights of the service Cost effective You need not own any backup infrastructure, say services , tools and devices to use this service. You can directly subscribe to the service and pay based on your usage. There are no additional compute charges involved in the service. You pay a fixed charge for each protected instance, and also for the storage that you consume in the cloud for storing your backup data. The...

Microsoft recommends usage of ARM for all new deployments in Azure. All new developments/features/services will be available in ARM going forward.  But  there are lot of services that are yet to be migrated to ARM. What if one of the services that you want to use is not currently available in ARM and you have already set up rest of your environment in ARM?  In such a scenario, you can always set up a site to site VPN between the classic V1 VNET and the ARM VNET. This process is also well documented: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-arm-asm-s2s-howto/   That being the case,  what if we want to test the interoperability of services and you want to move few already set up VMS in ARM to classic? I know that it is not a very common scenario. Also it is not a recommended approach for production deployment, ARM is definitely the way to go. However, for enabling that test run you might very badly...

Azure automation can be an Azure administrator's best friend and can  ease up your day to day administration work. There are three options available in Azure automation- Graphical runbooks, PowerShell Work flow and Powershell based runbooks   If you want to play around with Azure automation and want to quickly automate some daily mundane tasks, graphical runbooks are the easiest to start with . You can find many templates in the runbooks gallery in Azure that can easily get the job done easily  for you. Lets start with the basics. One of the common tasks that needs to be done is to start or stop VM at a scheduled time, say for eg: your Dev/Test machines that should be shutdown after office hours. The runbooks for this are readily available in the gallery. In this blogpost we will focus on a graphical runbook available in the gallery that can be used to start or stop VMs at a scheduled time.             ...

Hope you have gone through the Part1 and Part2 of  my blog series on Docker. In this post on my Docker series, I am exploring the creation of Docker images There are multiple ready made docker images available in Docker hub, which you could simply pull and use. However, what if you need a different combination of software versions than what is ready available. Simple, you create an image of your own with all required softwares installed There are two options to do this.The easiest option is to pull a base image and install everything you want, commit the container as a new image. What if you would like to make some changes down the line? You may have to redo the whole thing. That is where the option to create image using docker file helps. You can simply write a docker file to install and configure the required software. If you wish to make some changes at a later point, you could  edit the docker file and build a new image In this example , I will explain the proces...

                                                                                  Docker Remote Registry Continuing the blog series on my trysts with docker, in this installment we will look into the details of how to set up a docker remote registry. Hope now you have an idea on how to get Docker up and running , if not go ahead and read the first part of my blog series here Now that we have docker engine up and running, and  few containers spinned up in it we might very well think about a centralized docker image repository. Of course we have Docker hub, and you could  save your images there. But what if you want to have a bit more privacy and would like to save all your hard wo...

Having worked with multiple Virtualization platforms, I recently got an interesting opportunity to work with its younger sibling containerization . The  platform of choice was obviously Docker. Getting Docker up and run in an OS of your preference is a simple task, you can straightaway get it done using the instructions here . Interesting part is  getting to play around with it   Getting it up and running: Docker can be started as a services or at a tcp port. Starting as a service is pretty straight forward #service docker start However, the interesting bit is when you want to run it as a deamon listening to a specific port. This is useful in scenarios when you want to manage the docker engine remotely, say using a windows docker client or using one of the open source GUIs available for docker like Shipyard and Mist.io The command to run docker as a deamon listening to a port is # /usr/bin/docker  -d -H tcp://0.0.0.0:4243 -H unix:///var/run/docker.sock...

This is the second post in the blog series on Cloud security. You can see the first blog post here The Cloud security alliance group provides actionable best practices for businesses to transition to cloud services while mitigating the risk involved in doing so. As per the latest version of CSA guide The critical areas of focus in cloud computing is divided into fourteen domains