What if you could make configuring the supporting services of your VMs so much easier? And without needing to assign and manage several policies. This is where Azure Automanage comes flying in like the savior you always needed!
What is Automanage? Automanage is as simple as a configuration profile that you apply to your VMs that will automatically configure the services that are best practice for VMs in Azure. For example, Azure Log Analytics and Azure Backup.
Anyone who have used the portal to add rules to Azure Firewall will know how tedious and annoying it can get. With small fields to write both destination and source, it does get old very quick. And something that I found myself doing for several customers was setting the rules required for Azure AD Connect. I quickly got tired of doing it manually, so I created a Bicep template to deploy it much easier and faster.
With information security coming into the spotlight of mainstream media after more and more big companies experience millions of dollars in revenue loss due to security breaches and ransomware. Security is becoming, if not already; the field of IT with the most attention at it. Both companies and individuals are tearing apart operating systems and applications alike trying to find and even exploit the vulnerabilities they find. All this have made it even more critical for IT departments to be fast and thorough with patching systems because they are always catching up to the vulnerabilities.
I started my previous blog by introducing Azure Run Command as a feature to run Powershell and Bash scripts on VMs straight from the Azure Portal. In this blog I’m gonna dive deeper into the feature and show a real life example of how to use it.
The two versions of Run Command Something I didn’t mention in my last blog is that there are actually two different versions of Run Command.
The “Traditional” way to manage servers was to RDP or SSH into them and apply the changes you needed to do. And this was regarded as safe to do (Not by everyone of course) since you usually already were inside the office or datacenter. But when your servers are in another datacenter or even on the other side of the world, what can you do then? You can just open up RDP for your IP-address or a whole range of IP-addresses, but it is not recommended.
