Testing latency between Azure & AWS in the same region. Imagine you had a customer with workloads in AWS and workloads in Azure. This test was assuming the front-end workloads in Azure would connect to back-end workloads in AWS. The big question what would be the latency. To start with, let’s start with the general web speed tests from each public cloud provider to level set. Web Browser Speed Tests Tests results from both Azure & AWS using the browser and the popular speed test websites. Speedtest.net Comparing apples with apples, using the Telstra Sydney speed test server for both….
Programmably connect to a WiFi network using a password
Connecting to a wireless network using a password is harder than what you might think, as you need to create a WiFi ‘profile’. The below PowerShell code can do exactly what you need, it creates the WiFi profile, and connects you to the WiFi network automatically.
Easy tagging of resources in Azure for billing and charge back
Tagging of resources in Azure can be a pain, especially if you have heaps of resources deployed. Tagging is used primarily for billing purposes and tags applied to the resource group are not inherited by the resources in that resource group. What’s more, if you want to chargeback Azure consumption to the business across various business units, tagging is the best way to do it. There’s a few of ways you can chargeback to business units by using tags: Download or view your Azure billing invoice and daily usage data Connect to Microsoft Azure Enterprise with Power BI Cloudyn which has…
Windows 10 Adaptive Contrast
Have you ever experienced the contrast/brightness of the screen in Windows 10 change dynamically between applications? Especially switching from high white contrast apps like a web browser to a dark contrast application like VS Code for example? It’s pretty annoying. I have a Surface Pro 6 and its fairly off putting. It’s different to this setting where it changes the brightness/contrast across the board to the OS level regardless of specific apps: The setting I am talking about where it changes contrast as you change and flick between apps. Solution: From here https://www.windowscentral.com/how-disable-adapative-contrast-surface Adaptive contrast is very different than auto-brightness (or…
Microsoft Azure has the best global WAN
This blog post was recognised on this podcast and here’s the audio snippet (below) where they specifically talked about it. Thanks guys! Microsoft has the second biggest network in the world behind the internet Microsoft Cloud Show Podcast – Episode 281 Want to understand more about Azure’s global WAN and Microsoft’s network backbone? A recent 2018 Public Cloud Performance Benchmark Report from ThousandEyes says Azure has the best global WAN, out of the three major public cloud providers. – all of it is our own private network. Some of the highlights in this report are: AWS’ network design forces traffic from the end…
Save Money with Azure, intelligent shutdown of VMs
This blog post is based on 3 separate asks from 3 separate customers about adding value for their Azure subscriptions. They came to be and said “Marc, I would like to devise a scheme where at 7pm every night, all Dev/Test VMs can be shut down to save money and the business owners have the final say.” There’s one problem though, the business owners don’t have access to the Azure portal – it has to be done over email. What’s more, an option to force the shutdown of the VMs if the business owners don’t respond in a time frame…
Extended Security Updates | Windows Server 2008/R2 or SQL Server 2008/R2
Announced recently, the new Extended Security Updates which gives you 3 years free extended security updates past the end of Extended Support for: Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008 R2 SQL Server 2008 SQL Server 2008 R2 To make use of the Extended Security Updates offer for the versions of software above, you just need to either: Migrate your Windows Server 2008/R2 or SQL Server 2008/R2 workloads to Azure Purchase Extended Security Updates to get 3 more years of security updates for Windows Server 2008/R2 or SQL Server 2008/R2 Extended Security Updates is not to be confused with Mainstream Support & Extended Support. A bit of history… Microsoft Lifecycle Policy…
