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Showing posts from April, 2017

New Azure role - Azure Billing Reader

There is a small new feature on Azure Billing that made my day great. Small things matters and in this case is 100% applicable. Problem Until now there was no mechanism to share ONLY billing information with users. You could forward billing information to specific users. This was useful for last month consumptions, but nothing that you could do directly for the current month. Current solution Some shortcuts could be done to make available this information. The most simple way is  to give to the user the Co-Administrator rights. This will work great, but that user will have access to other resources also, not only to the billing data. Having access to all resources can be a downside, especially if you need to give access to a non-technical person that might click the wrong button (smile). You might reduce the access by using RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), but you would need some extra configuration steps. Another approach is by exporting billing and cost information using Azu

Control Azure Users Access using Role-Based Access Control

Problem As a customer I want to be able to restrict user access and rights to Azure Resources that are under the same Azure Subscription. The requirement can be extended a little more by specifying that a user needs to be able to view and access only Azure Resources that he is allowed. He shall be able to create or modify resources only specific resources.    If possible, all resources that user access or create should be under a predefined subnet. Options There are multiple approaches to a request like this. Even if Role-Based Access Control is a powerful mechanism to control access, the way how we can restrict access is limited and doesn't allow us to restrict fully the user as we need. A classical approach is to allow user to run ARM (Azure Resource Management) scripts only through a custom component that is hosted by us. Having full control on this component we can implement any kind of logic and business restriction. The downside of a solution like this is compl

[Post Event] Global Azure Bootcamp event, Cluj-Napoca, April 22th, 2017

For the 5th year in the row,   ITCamp community from Cluj-Napoca joined Global Azure Bootcamp event. In comparison with other communities events organized by in Cluj-Napoca, Global Azure Bootcamp is different because is purely hands-on lab. There were 3 different workshops of 90 minutes each where attendees had the opportunity to play and test Azure Functions, Machine Learning and Azure Resources Managers (ARM). We respected this year also the tradition to organize the event at Endava (ISDC) building, where the location is perfect for hands-on labs. Special thank you for our local sponsor - Endava . Agenda 09:00-09:30 - Sosirea participanÈ›ilor 09:30-11:00 - Azure Functions (Radu Vunvulea) 11:00-12:30 - Machine learning for mere mortals with Azure ML (Silviu Niculita) 12:30-14:00 - ARM Templates, how to create them, and use them in your CD pipeline (Florin Loghiade) Workshops descriptions Azure Functions (Radu Vunvulea)  What are Azure Functions? AWS Lambda from Azure. Th

[Post Event] Microsoft Data Amp—where data gets to work meet-up

Together with ITCamp community from Cluj-Napoca we joined our forces for 2 hours . We wanted to find more about how we can transform our business with our data -Microsoft Data Amp. A lot of new stuff were announced during the live streaming that can be viewed on  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/data-amp . If you ask me, the game changers are SQL Server 2017 that runs on Linux and the fully integration between SQL Server and other stacks like R. Nowadays you don't need to move your data outside the Database engine to execute ML. You have the ML full support direct in the database engine.

Running Azure Stream Analytics on Edge Devices

Azure Stream Analytics enable us to analyze data in real time. Connecting multiple streams of data, running queries on top of them without having to deploy complex infrastructure become possible using Azure Stream Analytics. This Azure service is extremely powerful when you have data in the cloud. But there was no way to analyze the data stream at device or gateway level. For example if you are in a medical laboratory you might have 8 or 12 analyzers. To be able to analyze the counters of all this devices to detect a malfunction you would need to push counters value to Azure, even if you don't need for other use cases. Wait! There is a new service in town that enable us to run the same Azure Stream Analytics queries but at gateway or device level - Azure Stream Analytics on Edge Devices. Even if the name is long and has Azure in the name, the service is a stand alone service that runs on-premises. This service allows us to run the same queries in real time over data streams th

Global Azure Bootcamp la Cluj-Napoca | April 22, 2017

Acesta este al cincilea an când ITCamp community organizează  Global Azure Boot Camp . Acesta este un eveniment la nivel global care are loc în peste 159 de locaÈ›ii. Ca È™i anul trecut, Clujul nu se lasă mai prejos È™i apare pe harta Azure. Pe data de  22 Aprilie  vă invităm pe toÈ›i la acest eveniment din Cluj-Napoca, care va conÈ›ine 3 workshop-uri. Link pentru înregistrare: https://itcamp-cj-2017-azurebootcamp.eventbrite.com Participarea la eveniment este  GRATUITÄ‚ , aÈ™a cum a fost È™i până acum la orice eveniment organizat de comunitatea ITCamp. Pe data de 22 Aprilie ne propunem să avem 3 workshop-uri de câte 90 de minute fiecare, unde putem să învățăm împreună cum să folosim diferite servicii Azure. Fiecare workshop conÈ›ine o parte teoretică È™i una practică. Din această cauză, o să aveÈ›i nevoie de un laptop. De ce aveÈ›i nevoie: Laptop +  Visual Studio  +  Microsoft Azure SDK  +  Un cont de Azure   Dacă doriÈ›i puteÈ›i să vă grupaÈ›i în grupuri de 2-3 persoane la acelaÈ™i laptop.

[Post-Event] Cluj ITCodecamp 2017: Azure Data Lake for super-developers

The best way to end an weekend is by a conference. So, this is what I've done. At the end of this weekend I joined Codecamp conference in Cluj-Napoca. As a free event, Codecamp gather IT speakers and attendees from all technologies and companies, being an opportunity to meet other people. In figures, there were around 900 people, 60 speakers and around 70 session - all of this in one day. At this conference I delivered a high-level session about Azure Data Lake. Being a new service, I decided that a high level session about it is the best approach. Below you can find more about my session. Title: Azure Data Lake for super-developers Abstract: Nowadays digital information is produced by each device that we touch. What we do after we receive this data can change the way how we do business, but to be able to store and process this data we need a powerful system like Azure Data Lake. This session we will discover the secrets that are behind Azure Data Lake and why this service

SQL Server v.Next - Data, analytics and artificial intelligence live event - April 19th, 2017

The IT landscape is changing every day. Nowadays it is more usual than ever to talk about data collecting, processing and visualization. If a few years ago we use to talk in TB of data, now PB is a normal data unit. I remember than 10 years ago having a database that was bigger than 1GB it was acceptable, but not very common for small or medium company size. If we are looking now around us, a database of 20GB is a commodity. Anyone will think the database is to big or you need special hardware for it. Security became now the biggest concern, where you persist data, what data you persist, who access what data are the questions that you need to face up. 5 years ago if you would say that you want to run SQL Server on Linux... it would be a joke, but look where we are not. We have SQL Server on Linux, we have containers, Docker and we see how Microsoft embrace the open source word. We are exited to find out more about new features that SQL v.Next is preparing to us. It's not only a

[Post-Event] April BucharestJS Meetup #21 | Building Node.JS Together (with Microsoft)

This week I had the opportunity to be invited by BucharestJS meetup to speak about Node.JS from Microsoft perspective. It was a challenge for me - speaking about Microsoft in a front of Node.JS people is not an easy task. I was happy to survive after one afternoon with around 80 people with no mercy to Microsoft and Azure. I'm sure that a part of them will give a try to Visual Studio Code and/or Azure Services. For me it was a pleasure to find people that were open to discover 'exotic' IDE and products. Thank you to all attendees that accepted for one hour to hear about Microsoft technologies. More information related to session, slides, demos can be find below. Title:  Building Node.js Together Abstract : JavaScript's simplicity, ubiquity, and event-driven paradigm, and its high performance runtimes like Microsoft's Chakra and Google's V8, have led it to spread beyond web pages and browsers to servers and clouds, IoT devices, mobile apps, and more via t