Part II – Kubernetes DevOps : Introduction to Helm

This is the second post in a multi-part blog series on Kubernetes DevOps using Azure. I am co-authoring this series with the help of my colleague at Microsoft, Daniel Selman. We recently worked on the Kubernetes project together and thought to share our learnings. In the last post, you got to better understand the application that was going to be deployed in […]

Building and Running an Auditing Solution on Blockchain

On 21st February, I will be conducting an event at Microsoft NYC campus on building and running a fully functional blockchain based audit trail application. The first half is a good fit for both business and technical audiences, as it covers auditing scenarios using blockchain. The latter half will showcase an open source project that provides tracking of Wikipedia change […]

Understanding R3 Corda and Running it on Azure

R3 Corda is a blockchain-inspired distributed ledger technology (DLT) from R3 that is specifically designed for financial and regulated transactions, and emphasizes privacy and security between participants. While it is generally available for download as open source code (corda.net), R3 also makes it available on the Azure platform and has plans to integrate Corda with numerous Azure capabilities. R3 recently […]

DevOps with Containers

Recently I did a video series for Microsoft Channel9 on DevOps with Containers (thanks to Lex Thomas and Chris Caldwell for recording these). The idea was simple- show and tell how container technology can help in improving the DevOps experience. It’s a ~2-hour long recording (divided into three parts for easy viewing) covers topics including containerization of applications, continuous integration and deployment […]

Using Client Certificate Authentication for Web API Hosted in Azure

During recent customer engagement there was a discussion around client certificate [a.k.a tls mutual] authentication and how to use it with asp.net web api that is hosted on azure as a azure api app. Apparently there is an article that covers this topic for web apps hosted in azure but it cannot be used as-is for web api as there are some differences on how to get […]

Developer’s Guide to Automated Install of ADFS On Windows Server 2016 (TP4)

Recently I ran into situations where have to build a developer enviorment that needs active directory federation services [adfs] running on windows server 2016 [currently in technical preview 4, hence w2k16-tp4,]. I am intentionally avoiding term adfs ‘v4’ which is really tempting but its about time to move away from these versions. From now on you can simply refer to it as […]

Reporting Unused Disks Space in Azure IaaS

If you’re using Azure VMs in your organization one of the common governance challenge is to identify the unused disk space that was just lying around in azure storage unused and cost company money unnecessarily. This usually happens when vms are deleted but vhds are kept so to make sure that data is not lost or just disks are marked […]