Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

I decided to start a new series of articles about tools that can be used by Developers to improve their experience with Microsoft Azure. Each week I will publish a post related to a tool. The main focus is on tools that are free of charge, but sometimes I might include paid one. Context : Having discussions with various technical people, especially from the development area, I realize that the tools that they are aware of are limited. There are so many tools that can improve our experience when we work with Microsoft Azure. Even so, many times we rely only on a few of them. Highlights of Azure SAS Generator Azure Services : Azure Storage (blobs, tables and queues) Cost : free of use How is delivered : Native Windows application Top 3 features: #1 SAS key generator #2 Works offline #3 Update the SAS key dynamically when you change an attribute Pain points: #1 Sometimes freeze and does not generate the keys #2 Cannot add accounts using your Azure acc...

This week I attended the ISTA Conference for my 3rd time, and I was impressed. This year I found a conference with more than 850 attendees and 25 presentations. I really liked the format, with only two tracks in parallel. This allowed the organisers to increase the quality of content. There were speakers from different companies like Uber, Google, VMWare, Experian and even Falcon. I had the opportunity to deliver a session about how we can develop and build an application that runs on top microservices and serverless and what are the technical challenge that we need to tackle. You can find below my session details and slides. Thank you ISTA team for this opportunity! Title : A hybrid approach of the serverless world 2019 Abstract : This session prepares us for tomorrow problems and needs by trying to present a world where serverless can coexist with microservices and even traditional systems. We discover an architecture approach that can solve today problems with tom...

On November 12th and 13th I attended  ITDays conference. At ITDays I was invited to speak about how we can reinvent the IT using Microsoft Azure and what is the future of cloud - Cloud as a Service how I like to call it. You can find more about my sessions, including the slides at the end of my post. It was the 7th edition of ITDays, where there were more than 80 sessions on 4 different tracks. The topics presented during the event were from different domains and industry from IoT & cloud to security and programming art. ITDays it's a good place where you can see what are the current trends of IT in the world and what is happening in Cluj-Napoca from this point of view. Title : CaaS - Cloud as a Service Abstract : Working with the cloud is not a big thing anymore; it is just another place where you can run your workload. Have you ever ask yourself what does the future prepare for us? Join this session if you want to discover how cloud is transforming th...

In my previous post, I’ve made a subjective comparison between AWS Cognito and Azure AD . I took into consideration only the features that I was directly interested in.  In this post, I want to summarise what are the main differences between Azure AD and AWS Managed Microsoft AD. Why? Because on AWS, the documentation related to what are features of AD available inside AWS Managed Microsoft AD is limited, and you cannot find a clear statement. Some of the cases I had to spin-up a service instance and check manually if a feature is available or not. First of all remember that the Azure AD is the last version of AD that Microsoft has, full-featured. In comparison, AWS is offering a ‘legacy’ instance, with features that are available inside the on-premises AD deployments. Because of this, the features available inside AWS Managed Microsoft AD is just a subset of the ones available inside Azure AD. The question that we need to answer is WHICH ARE THE ONES … The below ta...

In the last few weeks, I was involved in multiple opportunities on Microsoft Azure and Amazon, where we had to analyse AWS Cognito, Azure AD and other solutions that are available on the market. I decided to consolidate in one post all features and differences that I identified for both of them that we should need to take into account. Take into account that Azure AD is an identity and access management services well integrated with Microsoft stack. In comparison, AWS Cognito is just a user sign-up, sign-in and access control and nothing more. The focus is not on the main features, is more on small things that can make a difference when you want to decide where we want to store and manage our users.  This information might be useful in the future when we need to decide where we want to keep and manage our users.  Feature Azure AD (B2C, B2C) AWS Cognito Access token lifetime Default 1h – the value is configurable 1h – cannot be m...

Last weekend (November 2th, 2019), I joined a local .NET event that took place in Cluj-Napoca - ApexVox. The second edition of ApexVox had 3 tracks in parallel, with a good lineup of speakers - a lot of them were foreigners. Around 120-130 people joined the event and had the opportunity to learn new things related to .NET from speakers like Konrad Kokosa or Matthias Koch. In comparison with the 1st edition, the quality of content grew and we hope that we will see the same trend in the future also. I had the great opportunity to deliver a session about Azure tools for developers that can boost our productivity during the development phase. If you want to check my slides and abstract you can find it below. Thank you for the invitation and see you next time! Title : Developer Tools for Microsoft Azure Abstract : During this session, we'll take a look at the proactivity tools that can be used to improve our development experience on Azure. We'll talk about tools from ...

Working with Azure Regions from China is sometimes a little bit more complicated. One of the issues that I encountered is the ability to sync content between different Azure Regions. Inside Azure regions that are in China, things go very smooth. The challenge appears in the moment when you need to handle data synchronisation between a region from China and a one from Europe, for example. I had this case between China East 2 and North Europe. There is no out of the box, the mechanism to do something like that and you need to handle this synchronisation by yourself. We will take a look at two different scenarios. A simple one, where is less automation, but the investment is lower, and in 10 minutes you have the sync mechanism in place. The second one is a little more complex, but can be used with success for recurrent activities. Simple Use Case For simple scenarios, you should not start to write code by yourself. Take a look at AzCopy that is a command-line tool that enables u...