Chinny Chukwudozie, Ai architecture.

Thoughts on the Meltdown and Spectre Processor Vulnerabilities.

Summary: A new class of security vulnerabilities referred to as “Speculative execution side-channel attacks” also known as “Meltdown and Spectre” were publicly disclosed by Cyber security researchers this week. Given the gravity of these flaws, many concerns have been rightly raised. In this article I will cover their impact as well as the Microsoft Cloud’s…

jbernec

January 5, 2018

Uncategorized

AWS, Azure, Azure Cloud, Cloud, CPUs, Meltdown, Microsoft, Modern Processors, Patches, Processor Vulnerabilities, Spectre
Automate the deployment and configuration of Azure Site Recovery for Hyper-V to Azure with PowerShell.

Azure Site Recovery service enables businesses ensure business continuity by keeping their workloads and applications running on Virtual Machines and physical servers available if a site goes down. Site Recovery replicates these workloads running on VMs and physical servers so that they remain available in a secondary location if the primary site isn’t available. It…

jbernec

October 4, 2017

Azure, Azure Automation Account, Azure Resource Manager, Azure Runbook, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Windows PowerShell

Azure PowerShell, Azure Resource Manager, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Virtual Machines, BCDR, Hyper-V 2016, Nested Virtualization, Recovery Services Vault, Windows Server 2016
Automate Azure VM Deployment and Disk Encryption using PowerShell and ARM Templates..

PowerShell helps me better understand the internal workings of complex Cloud based operations that in many instances have a lot of moving parts. Better understanding helps determine ways to automate these operations that could otherwise take much time and repetition to accomplish.I developed the following Deploy-ManagedEncryptedLinuxVM PowerShell function to automate the provisioning, installation of LAMP…

jbernec

September 27, 2017

Azure, Azure Active Directory, Azure AD Service Principal, Azure Automation Account, Azure Disk Encryption, Azure Key Vault, Azure Resource Manager, Azure Runbook, Azure Windows PowerShell

Apache, ARM Templates, Azure Disk Encryption, Azure Key Vault, Azure PowerShell, Azure VM Extension, Bash Script, CentOS 7.3, CentOS Linux, LAMP, Managed Disk, MariaDB
Azure PowerShell Function App automates Azure Storage file sync to secondary Storage Account.

Azure Storage Files is a sub service of Azure Storage Accounts. It offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol (also known as Common Internet File System or CIFS). The cloud File shares can be mounted concurrently by cloud or on-premises deployments of…

jbernec

September 18, 2017

Azure File Storage Copy, Azure Function App

Azure File Storage, Azure File Storage Copy, Azure File Storage Sync, Azure Function App, Azure Function App Settings, Azure PowerShell, Azure Storage Accounts, Encryption Key File, Serverless Architecture
PowerShell Function Concurrently Starts up/Shuts down Multiple Azure Resource Manager VMs.

One of the more relevant and cost saving tasks when working in Azure Cloud is fast and efficient shutdown and startup of virtual machines. Some of the options available could be to : a) Iterate through a csv list of VMs or Resource Group of VMs and serially shutdown or startup the VMs. This can…

jbernec

August 15, 2017

Azure, Azure AD Service Principal, Azure Automation Account, Azure Key Vault, Azure Resource Manager, Azure Runbook, Azure Windows PowerShell

Azure Automation, Azure IaaS, Azure Infrastructure as a Service, Azure PowerShell, Azure VMs, Azure VMs Shutdown, Azure VMs Startup
Remove Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS) from a WS2012 R2 with PowerShell.

I decided to tear down my Azure Lab IaaS and ASR infrastructure and rebuild it. The process involves removing the ASR configurations, Recovery Vaults, S2S VPNs, VNets and Azure VM running as a Azure based Domain controller for resilience with on-premise infrastructure and Azure deployed Apps. The next steps will include uninstalling the Domain Controller,…

jbernec

August 12, 2017

Active Directory, Active Directory Domain Services, Azure, Azure Site Recovery, Azure VPN, DCPromo, Domain Controller, FSMO, Microsoft Hyper-v, PowerShell, Powershell 4.0, Windows Server 2012 R2

Active Directory Domain Services, ADDS, ADDSDeployment, Azure, Azure Resource Groups, Azure Resource Manager, Azure Site Recovery, PowerShell 5.0, WS2012 R2
Configuring Cisco Virtual Switch System (VSS) on Cisco Catalyst 4500X Switches.

As part of a network infrastructure upgrade at a client site, I’ll be implementing Cisco VSS (Virtual Switching System). This technology will go a long way to meet some of the stated objectives of this infrastructure upgrade which include : Physical Hardware Redundancy, High Availability achieved by Switch Clustering, Self-healing, Increased bandwidth (10 GB trunk),…

jbernec

August 12, 2017

Cisco, Virtual Switch System, VSS

Cisco, Cisco IOS, Cisco Switch, Ether Channel, Infrastructure Upgrade, MEC, MultiChassis Etherchannel, Networking, Port Channel, Switch, Switch Virtual Domain, Switchport, Virtual Switching System, VSS
Implement the Azure Invoice API in Azure Automation Runbook.

The new Azure Invoice API enables Azure Subscription users with the appropriate role assignments to download and view current and past Invoices programmatically. Till now, this was only possible via the Azure Management Portal. For Subscription users to be able to download these invoices, the account administrator needs to enable the “Access to Invoice” feature…

jbernec

July 14, 2017

Azure, Azure AD Service Principal, Azure Automation Account, Azure Resource Manager, Azure Runbook, Azure Windows PowerShell

Azure Automation, Azure Runbook, AzureRM Invoice API, AzureRM Key Vault, PowerShell Scripts
Automate Azure Resource Group deployment with Azure PowerShell.

I developed the following PowerShell function to automate the creation and removal of Azure Resource Groups based on Azure AD Group membership in a Demo Azure subscription. The script is deployed as a Runbook in an Azure Automation account and scheduled to run once a day. As new users are added to a designated Azure Active Directory security…

jbernec

June 10, 2017

Azure, Azure Active Directory, Azure AD Service Principal, Azure Automation Account, Azure Resource Manager, Azure Runbook, Azure Windows PowerShell

Automation Runbooks, Azure AD, Azure AD Service Principal, Azure PowerShell, Azure Resource Manager, Azure Resource Manager Portal
Configuring an Azure VM From a Sysprepped Source Image using ARM PowerShell.

While working on an Azure IaaS deployment, I was required to configure an Azure VM using a generalized image in a different resourcegroup.In this post, I want to document my experience using Azure Resource Manager Powershell cmdlets to achieve the related tasks. The Sysprep tool in the C:\Windows\System32 directory of the windows Azure virtual machine…

jbernec

January 19, 2017

Azure, Azure Resource Manager, Azure Windows PowerShell

Azure Network Interface, Azure Resource Groups, Azure Resource Manager, Azure Resource Manager Portal, Azure Resource Manager PowerShell, Azure Storage Accounts, Azure Virtual Machine Config, Azure Virtual Networks, Azure Virtual Networks Subnet