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Articles by Sarah Lean
Azure Storage Mover: How to migrate files from AWS S3 to Azure
Moving files between environments can be a headache. Whether it’s from on-premises to Azure, or from AWS to Azure, there’s always the same challenge: how do you do it securely, at scale, and without reinventing the wheel? Traditionally, you might reach for tools like AzCopy, Azure Data Box, or Azure Migrate, but there’s a new option designed to make migrations smoother: Azure Storage Mover.
Understanding AI: Common terms and acronyms made simple
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on everyone’s lips these days, but it often comes with a flurry of acronyms and technical terms. Which can make you feel overwhelmed. Let’s break down some of the most common AI related terms and help you feel more confident in conversations and this fast-moving space. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer system to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, like understanding text, making decisions or spotting patterns in data.
How to use Terraform to generate secrets
Managing secrets like passwords or encryption keys is a critical part of deploying and managing a secure infrastructure. Doing it manually is risky and time-consuming and also can be error-prone. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through how you can automatically generate a secure password, set an expiry date, and then store it safely in Azure Key Vault all via Terraform. Let’s dive in.
What is HashiCorp Vault?
Protecting sensitive data like passwords, API keys, and database credentials is a top priority for businesses. This is where HashiCorp Vault can help. HashiCorp Vault is a tool designed to securely store and manage sensitive information. Think of it as a highly secure digital safe where you can keep all your secrets. These "secrets" can be anything from passwords and API keys to certificates and encryption keys.
What is Terrascan?
Let's dive into a tool that's making waves in the realm of cloud infrastructure security – Terrascan. If you've been exploring the vast landscape of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), you might have stumbled upon this powerful tool. But fear not if you haven't! I'm here to guide you through what Terrascan is all about and why it's becoming a must-have in the toolkit of cloud engineers. What is Terrascan used for? Terrascan is a static code analysis tool specifically designed for IaC.
What is Cloud-native?
There is a lot of terminology within the IT industry, and sometimes it can be daunting trying to keep up. I want to tackle something we hear quite a lot at the moment, cloud-native. It's a term we hear quite often, so let's explore what it means and what some of the benefits are. What is Cloud-native and how does it work?
How to format your Terraform code
Does poorly formatted code upset you? If so, it’s essential you avoid creating such code yourself. Most programming languages adhere to specific style guidelines, and HashiCorp Terraform language is certainly no exception. A single misaligned bracket or excessive indentation can render your Terraform configuration files hard to read and maintain. However, by employing the terraform fmt command you can avoid these coding inconsistencies.
Deploy a AWS S3 bucket with Terraform
Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that can help you define resources within your environment. In this article, I want to take you through deploying your first resource within AWS via Terraform. The resource we are going to deploy is an AWS S3 bucket.
What is Azure Arc?
Cloud computing has revolutionised the way we store, manage, and process data. However, as more organisations move their workloads to the cloud, managing and monitoring these environments has become increasingly complex. Azure Arc is a game-changing solution that simplifies multi-cloud management, enabling businesses to manage their cloud resources seamlessly across multiple environments.
Introduction to Terraform
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allows you to programmatically provision the infrastructure you need to run your software code or resources for your organisation. There are many tools considered as IaC tools. Hashicorp’s Terraform is one such Infrastructure as Code tool. Terraform is an open source DevOps tool that uses Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) to define and provision your infrastructure. It can be used with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and your on-premises infrastructure.
Infrastructure as Code: The benefits and the tools
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the management of your infrastructure through machine readable definition files, much like source code for an application. The infrastructure that you manage through IaC could relate to networks, virtual machines, load balancers, monitoring, containers, databases, storage and much more. The principle of using IaC is to bring a repeatable and consistent method to deploying your environment every time you need it.
14 days of Git
Git is a tool that I have learnt as I go. I've read some basic tutorials, I've mashed some keys into the command line and managed to make it do what I want to. But I don't really know the tool. I haven't sat down and read the manual at all. I want to change that. I want to spend some time learning Git properly. Working through some scenarios and learning. With the aim at being a more proficient Git user. It's a journey, I want you all to join me on. The plan I have a learning plan.
Create an S3 Bucket using AWS CloudFormation
In this blog post I want to show you how to create an S3 bucket using a CloudFormation template. If you are new to Amazon Web Services (AWS)'s CloudFormation templates, this will be a great first template to deploy! What is CloudFormation? AWS CloudFormation is a tool that can help you create or manage your resources within AWS in a programmatic way using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). It can help you replicate your environment easily within a few clicks.
Chocolatey: what is it?
What is it? Chocolatey is a free open source package manager for Windows. It can help you install, manage and upgrade software on your desktops or servers. It can help make life easier than finding the MSI or EXE file needed to install software then walking through those installation wizards. At it's core Chocolatey is an open source tool, that anyone can contribute to and help evolve.
AWS Storage Classes explored
AWS • Mar 17, 2022 Are you starting your AWS learning journey or studying towards the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam? Below is a guide to the various tiers of classes that exist when you spin up an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) storage resource. AWS S3 Storage Classes Amazon S3 offers eight storage classes: S3 Standard - this is a general purpose tier, that supports applications that require low latency and high throughput.
Find unused storage accounts in Azure
No one wants to pay more than they have to and that is why when using the cloud you need to be on top of removing unused resources, or orphaned resources. In a previous blog post I showed you how to find any unused disks or NICs from deleted virtual machines. In this blog post I want to help you understand how you can find those unused storage accounts within your Azure subscriptions. There are three methods I've used to start the hunt. Azure Portal The first method I like to use is Azure Monitor.
Find Orphaned Azure Resources
Often when you are looking to delete virtual machine (VM) resources within the Azure Portal it is common to end up with some orphaned resources, mostly disks and network adapters (NIC). When an Azure VM is deleted the disks and NICs are not deleted.  This is incase you would like to rebuild your virtual machine using the disk.
Study Guide SC-300 Microsoft Identity and Access Administrator
The SC-300 exam was released in 2021 and is the Microsoft Identity and Access Administrator. The exam is aimed at those who look after hybrid identity solutions or are part of a team that is looking after it. Below is a list of the exam objectives and some study resources that can be used to aid your study towards passing the exam.
Tips and Tricks when using Windows Package Manager
Aug 17 2021 12:01 AM Windows Package Manager is an open-source tool that can help you install and manage software on your PC. I want to share some tips and hints that I have found while using the tool. Settings You can tweak some settings by typing winget settings. This will open the JSON file that allows you to change some of the default settings. My favourite setting is to change the progress bar that is displayed by turning it into a rainbow progress bar.
Install PowerShell 7 with Windows Package Manager
I recently noticed that on my machine I was on an older version of PowerShell and not taking advantage of PowerShell 7 and I wanted to make sure I was using the latest version. And since I am a big fan of Windows Package Manager at the moment I wanted to see if I could update my PowerShell version with that.
Weekly Update #59 - Getting back to normal
Weekly Update #59 - Getting back to normal Sarah Lean's Weekly Update Podcast • By Sarah Lean • 18 minutes ago 1x Weekly Update #59 - Getting back to normal This week has been another quick week, I've been busy trying to catch up on admin that I missed last week when I was focussing on Ignite and also I've been trying to catch up on creating some content.
Voices of the Azure Community- Sarah Lean, Cloud Advocate, Scotland
Voices of the Azure Community- Sarah Lean, Cloud Advocate, Scotland A warm welcome to Sarah Lean, Cloud Advocate and Founder of the Glasgow Azure User Group as she joins us for ‘Voices of the Azure Community’. We hope you enjoy this insight into the work Sarah carries out to support the Azure Community. Please tell us about your own role.
Azure DNS Private Zones
Azure DNS Private Zones has just gone generally available (GA), but what is it and why should you be interested in it? The Domain Name System (DNS) resolves a service name such a VM01, into an IP address. Azure DNS is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) that helps to provide a reliable platform for managing and resolving internet-facing DNS domain names.
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