Deploying resources and workloads at scale requires a healthy amount of automation. Automation helps to deliver consistent and repeatable results. I’ve tried to categorize some of the technology and provide some pointers to areas of application and pros and cons.

A request that I get many times is to provide guidance and best-practices on how to implement monitoring and operations management with and/or for Azure. Most organizations have subtle differences which makes it hard to put out a generic concept of how to enable this. There are high-level ideas but in my discussions with customers and partners I’m hearing that this is not detailed enough.

I’ve learned about a “hidden feature” recently that enables some cool scenarios. Log Analytics or Azure Data Explorer aficionados will probably know all about functions already but for Application Insights this has not been documented yet and is not visible through the Azure portal.

When deploying Azure File Sync one question many customers routinely ask is how the network bandwidth required can be calculated. This depends of course on a variety of factors.

The most prominent factor is churn rate. How much data is changed over time. It is best to look at this rate with an hourly resolution so that seasonality can be accounted for (user-centric shares will have much more churn throughout working hours).

A colleague of mine, Tyler Ayers, has written a pretty neat Azure Function that tracks changes made to Azure Resource Manager Providers (ARM) and show these changes in a timeline.

The details will give you a clear overview what has been changed and where (which region) that change is available. This helps to see changes to resource providers and adapt existing ARM templates if required.

This is why my job is so much fun. I have been working with the CISO of a large retailer that operates multiple independent web portals (some with shopping functions enabled).

As the CISO his primary concern is security. And one of the first steps they are taking is to take a look at the authentication patterns that arrive at the individual user stores.

[UPDATE 02/12/2019] There has been changes to the way Log Analytics tracks usage data. Check out the post on the updated mechanisms.

One favorite question I hear: “How can we plan for Log Analytics?” or “How much data will be transmitted?”

In February I had the chance to attend a session by Yuri Diogenes, Program Manager at Microsoft, on how Azure Security Center works and how to demo it in a real life scenario.

The session he gave ended up as one of the excellent Azure Security Center Playbooks that are available for download on Microsoft TechNet Gallery.

Azure File Sync lets you tier data from on-premises systems to a cloud share based on Azure File. Local nodes can act as hot-caches, caching data based on access and modification patterns. Azure File Sync supports multi-master sync so that you can deploy those caches to multiple offices and replicate data across your organization.

Yesterday Microsoft announced the evolution of DevOps. Or rather the evolution of DevOps tooling from Microsoft known as Visual Studio Team Services: Azure DevOps.

Azure DevOps represents 15 years of engineering in services to help developers turn an idea into production code. Azure DevOps offers Pipelines, Boards, Artifacts, Repos and Test Plans to cover all aspects of modern software engineering.