This blogpost is posted in correlation with the Festive Tech Calendar. Festive Tech Calendar is a community event that goes on through the whole of December. The event is raising donations for the Raspberry PI Foundation. The Raspberry PI Foundation is a charity that help children learn to code. Please checkout the Just Giving page and the Festive Tech Calendar.
Santa’s workshop has changed immensely the last 10 years. With kids wanting iPhones, PlayStations or the newest Fortnite battle pass.
Most of the common Azure cost optimizations are quick-fixes. These could include Public IPs that have been forgotten, VM Snapshots that have been lying around for too long or VMs that are stopped, but not deallocated. To have good cost hygiene in your environment, you could automate this using Azure Automation. In this article, I will show you how to automate common cost optimizations. Please check out Azure Back to School for more good content from the Azure Community
Even on the North Pole they must adopt new technologies, and Santa has started using Bicep to deploy his list of this year’s presents. Last year, Santa got a huge fine from the North pole Data Protection Authority after he committed the full naughty list into source control in a public repository. This year, Santa needs help with securing his secrets in Bicep templates during deployments!
Before I start the blogpost, I want to give a shoutout to the organizers of the Festive Tech Calendar for the amazing work they do!
Bicep is an IaC-language which is created by Microsoft for Azure. Therefore, it does not have capabilities to do configuration management of Virtual machines directly. There are however ways to do some level of desired state configuration (DSC) on OS-level of Virtual machines using another Azure service. This service is Run Commands! Note that there is other services like Azure Automation and Azure Automanage that do DSC, but this blogpost is about Run Commands.
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.
