Windows Server 2008 End Of Life

---

Windows Server 2008 Countdown

From the time of publication (07/10/2019) it is only 99 days until Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 go out of support. This means there will not be any more Security Updates for these Operating Systems (OS).
See Microsoft’s guidance for more information.
The “end of life” of an operating system is also commonly a time where more vulnerabilities are exposed and exploited.

Migration Options

Not everything is lost though at this point if you are not able to upgrade to Windows Server 2019 yet. Microsoft gives you the option to migrate their Windows Servers running these Operating Systems to Azure and that way receive three years of additional support (including security updates) at no additional cost.
This gives you a bit more time to sort out the OS upgrade while running on Azure.
On top of this those rehosted virtual machines will also be eligible for “bring your own licence” and including an upfront commitment to running those virtual machines (reserved instances) you can save up to 80% of the compute cost.

Considerations

It is simple to just “lift & shift” your virtual machines into your Azure environment and run them without any changes. This however might not be the best solution for most, as this is a common cause for bill-shock, security issues or outages.
Most virtual machines do not need to run 24x7x265. Most virtual machines do not need the almost default on-premises 4 vCPU / 16 GB RAM configuration, but can get away with much less than this.
Rightsizing, turning things off, automating the deployment and leveraging cloud infrastructure services are considerations you must take into account when migrating workloads to the cloud.

A good partner

On this journey to the cloud an experienced partner at your side is important. One with proven capabilities in this area helping customers move to a more modern platform.
Reach out to [email protected] to learn more about our offer to help you stay secure, current and do not experience bill-shock.

Close

New Azure Webinar Series

---

Free Azure webinar

As part of our commitment to training and the community we are happy to announce that we will start a new series of free Azure webinars presented by David.

Register here to get your FREE ticket. Yes, FREE!

Webinar format

The idea behind these webinars is to present a small, realistic problem or task in and around Azure infrastructure, DevOps or cloud architecture and get this resolved in the duration of the webinar, typically 30mins. There will also always be enough time for Q&A on the topic that was presented on.
Webinars will be hosted via Microsoft Teams which will make the presenter / attendee interaction a lot smoother.

We are already very much looking forward to the first webinar next week and to your attendance.

Close

Getting started with Pulumi on Azure

---

Getting started with Pulumi on Azure

Pulumi? Someone the other day didn’t quite hear me right and asked “Haloumi?”. Well, I can’t blame them, Pulumi is still a new player, started in 2017 by two former Microsoft employees.
What does Pulumi do? Well, they took Infrastructure as Code VERY literal and developed their product also called Pulumi. If tools like ARM or Terraform are Infrastructure as Code then Pulumi is Infrastructure as real Code with support for quite a few programming languages already, mainly Javascript and Typescript (using the nodejs runtime) in a stable release, and Python and Go as a preview release.
This means we are getting out of YAML hell or the need to know “yet another DSL”.
Pulumi is currently on version 0.17.1, it’s open source hosted on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license and has very frequent releases.

Read the full article on David’s blog.

Close

How to install Azure Service Fabric SDK

---

This is a quick one but it cost me quite a bit of time to solve this little puzzle, which ended up being a not too difficult one after all.
I was asked to create an Azure pipeline which would create a new Azure DevOps build agent based on a Windows Server 2016 VM.

Azure DevOps build agent

Build agents usually require specific software to be installed on them so that applications can be built, compiled, packaged, whatever you want to call it. As did this one.
One of those applications was the Azure Service Fabric SDK.
The official way of installing this SDK is through the Web Platform Installer (WebPI). I have always used the webpicmd.exe to install features unattended (as you should), so it came a bit as a surprise to me when the installation of the Azure Service Fabric SDK repeatedly failed on a vanilla Windows Server 2016 Datacenter.
Read the full article on David’s blog.

Close

Being a Microsoft Azure MVP

---

IT is not my job it’s my passion

They say if you find a job you love, you don’t have to work another day in your life.

After my first passion didn’t work out as a career (I intended to become an Air Traffic Controller as I love aviation) I discovered my passion for IT.
Over ten years ago I started off as a consultant for a company in Germany and soaked up all the information like a sponge. From day 1 I had to learn something, literally, that I had to learn, constantly and continuously. It never stopped.

I worked on projects such as a large scale Windows 7 upgrade for an insurance or a centrally hosted (you could call it Private Cloud) Citrix XenApp environment for tens of thousands of users at a banking group.
I worked with tools like Windows PowerShell, every time I clicked something that I could’ve done with a script somebody figuratively slapped my hand. I grew into this industry with an “automation first” mindset.
I worked with customers in the insurance, banking, travel, retail and government verticals. All of which have their own challenges that they face and I always enjoyed helping those customers that asked for guidance.

Over time I had collected quite an extensive knowledge base of script snippets (some nowadays call them gists), workarounds, hacks, fixes, etc that I had all locally in a OneNote. When my manager back then proposed that I should maybe publish all of those as blog articles I did just that and ever since I’m probably still my most frequent visitor to my own blog.

You don’t have to know everything. You just need to know where to look.

Community engagement and Microsoft MVP

I enjoyed being able to help more people through those blog articles even those beyond my direct reach through my day to day work. My network grew and I started gaining an interest in local user groups, events and conferences. Eventually my attendance to those resulted in me agreeing to speak at the E2EVC event in 2010 in Vienna/Austria. A terrifying but very rewarding experience. I was hooked on public speaking and being able to directly talk to members of communities worldwide, not just via social media.

After five years of a lot of late night learning and engagement within the community I got awarded my first MVP Award – Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Enterprise Client Management. In 2016 I was awarded the MVP for Cloud and Datacenter Management and in 2017 finally the MVP for Microsoft Azure.
A very proud moment in my career as hard work does pay off.

An MVP Award cannot be purchased, you can’t sit an exam for it, and you don’t just keep it once given – it gets (re)awarded every year. Microsoft makes sure to only give the awards to the most engaged individuals, and this is the reason why there are only around 3200 MVPs globally across a number of award categories.
In the Azure category there are only 390 worldwide and 15 in Australia.

Constant change is good

My day 1 lesson, that I need to continuously learn, still holds true. Standstill means falling behind. This is why throughout my career I changed and adapted to industry changes and stayed relevant. A lesson that organisations, no matter which vertical they are in, need to also learn.
I take this approach into every single customer engagement and it is one of the core values here at XIRUS: Constant sensible change is good.
A great partner on your journey will guide you through the rough times, will connect you with the best people and make sure that all parties will arrive to the end of the project in the best way possible.

Reach out

If you want to know more about how we work, what the MVP program is or how to get involved in the IT community, please reach out via our contact form or our social media channels.

Close

Azure Foundations Training

---

Safe the date for our upcoming Azure Foundations Training in Melbourne on Thursday 31/01/2019

Learn tips and tricks from a Microsoft MVP how to set up and configure Azure for your business.

Training Objectives

This training will cover a company’s Azure subscription design and foundational setup.
Attendees will learn how to set up Azure subscriptions and configure them according to common industry best practices.
Make sure that the environments attendees are responsible for follow internal and external compliance policies and that these are continuously monitored and corrected if necessary.
Once the subscription is set up a basic network infrastructure for Azure Virtual Machines will be created and strategies for migrating VMs from on-premises to the cloud will be introduced.
At the conclusion of this training we aim for attendees to be able to straight away apply most learnings to their environment.

Target Audience

IT Pros / Operations Team Members / System Administrators / DevOps

Agenda

• What is in an Azure Subscription?
• Design and setup
• Getting started with Azure Policies
• Getting started with Azure Blueprints
• Getting started with Azure alerting and notifications
• Setting up a basic Azure compute infrastructure
• Introducing migration strategies to the cloud

Event location will be updated closer to the date.

Limited spaces available, tickets can be purchased from Eventbrite: Click here to learn more!

Close

A Strong Cloud Foundation

---

Without a strong foundation your cloud will soon collapse.
To make sure that is not the case we believe it is paramount to get the foundations right even before deploying the first application into the cloud.

Business Requirements

A cloud foundation builds on business requirements, not on tools. Tools will be used to implement the business requirements, not the other way around where the choice of tools dictate the business requirements.

• You work in a highly regulated environment? (e.g. PCI)
• You can only deploy into approved cloud regions?
• GDPR applies to you?
• You need to comply to Sarbanes Oxley (SOX)?
• Services without owners / cost centres should be automatically terminated?

These are just examples of requirements that need to be addressed in order to define and build a great cloud foundation. Ignoring those questions and falling for the dreaded get-there-itis (the need to quickly get things done) will lead to subpar results.

Strong Cloud Partner

At Xirus we believe in baking compliance, governance and security into the foundation and ongoing deployments. Those areas are not afterthoughts or tech debt that can be dealt with later “if we get to it”, they are crucial to a successful cloud platform.
Our sole focus on Microsoft Azure means that we are in the best position to help our customers to be successful whatever their business requirements are.
If you are about to embark on your Microsoft Azure cloud journey, or you want to get more out of your cloud investments, contact us

Close

Conference season

---

We are thrilled to announce our presence at two major independent conferences on two continents over the next two months.
David will be travelling and presenting on important Cloud topics at the following conferences:

• IT DevConnections in Dallas / USA
• Highload++ 2018 in Moscow / Russia (English website)

Cloud Track Owner / Promo code

David will not just represent XIRUS at those two big conferences, but at IT DevConnections he will also run the Cloud track as Track Chair.
In this role David has already made sure that interesting and important topics have been selected for this track and will also host a panel discussion and multiple Birds of a Feather sessions throughout the conference.
As part of his role at the conference we are happy to provide you with an $800 USD discount code for new registrations available here

Azure consumption

When running any workloads in the cloud it is important to stay in control of what is happening in your environment. We believe the following topics therefor cover areas that Microsoft Azure customers want to get a better understanding of, which is why David will present those as the main speaker:

• METRICS! METRICS! METRICS!

  3AM, on a Sunday, you should be asleep, but instead you are woken up by a text claiming that “the super-critical app is timing out again”. What is happening? Where is it slow? Why is it slow? In this session we will discover the services that Microsoft Azure offers to customers to collect logs and specifically metrics of our cloud workloads. We will understand what metrics we should be interested in when running on a cloud platform and how to get to those metrics. We will learn about open-source tools and will definitely build some nice dashboards. In the end attendees will have the knowledge to start building their own metrics dashboards and next time they are woken up at 3AM they will be able to quickly understand what is happening.

• Clean your mess up! Hygiene in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

  “With great power comes great responsibility.” - every Ops team in the cloud, ever! With all those possibilities that cloud providers promise us a lot of fears travel along. “How can I make sure that workloads are only deployed in region XYZ?” “How do I know who did what?” “How do I get notified if something happens?” “How do I not get bill shock?” All of these questions are normal and need to be addressed in every implementation. Come along and hear about offerings and services in Microsoft Azure that will assist companies to clean up their cloud and keep it tidy.

Get in touch

Will you be at one of those conferences?
Do you want to catch up with David while he is there?
Reach out via our contact form or email.

Close

Do Cloud right

---

If you are contemplating a move to the public cloud then it does not matter which industry you are in, Retail, Travel, Banking, FinTech, Health or even Government.
These all have one thing in common; you need a good strategy.
Actually, they have one more thing in common, cloud is for you! If you do it right.

Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2018

Yes, DevOps. Ignoring this now very over-used term for a second, the “DevOps Research and Assessment” team has, in collaboration with huge industry names, released the “Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2018”.
Research sponsors were companies like Amazon Web Services, CA Technologies, CloudBees, Datical, Deloitte, Electric Cloud, GitLab, IT Revolution, Microsoft, PagerDuty, Pivotal, Redgate, Sumo Logic, Tricentis, and XebiaLabs.

Some key findings out of the report:

• How “cloud” is implemented is important.
  • There is a big difference between “using the cloud” and “being in the cloud”.
• A company’s industry does not matter.
  • Correctly implemented, cloud fits every industry vertical, regulated and non-regulated ones.
• Outsourcing of key functionalities hinders performance.
  • Even if it looks like it is saving money, in the long run, outsourcing hurts your business on multiple layers.

The full report can be found here: https://devops-research.com/research.html

Correct Cloud Implementation

Getting it right from the start is difficult and you need a good partner that understands your needs.
If you are about to embark on your Microsoft Azure cloud journey, or you want to get more out of your cloud investments, contact us

Close

Welcome our first employee

---

It is with much pride that I am happy to announce that from today on XIRUS has its first employee.
Technically, really the second employee, as David was the first, but who cares for technicalities?!

Without further ado, please welcome Sandra O’Brien to the team.

Sandra joins us from the Victoria Racing Club where she was the Executive Assistant to Executive General Manager Customer Engagement for almost 3 years. Sandra will help us grow the company and business focusing on marketing and branding, but also shape new offerings.

Exciting times lie ahead. Stay tuned for more big announcements in the not too distant future!

Close

Techmentor conference at Microsoft HQ

---

Two weeks ago David represented us at the Techmentor Event in Redmond / USA which was held on Microsoft’s global headquarters, a great venue for a great event.
Apart from delivering two very well received sessions on cloud topics he also used the opportunity to meet members of some Microsoft Azure product teams.
This was a great opportunity to sit down face to face with the people actually working on those great services and giving them feedback on those that I was given by my customers. Microsoft, the new Microsoft, is very open to such feedback and some great conversations were had, which will enable us to deliver an even better service to our customers here in Australia.

Some great takeaways we were able to gather at the Techmentor event:

don’t live in a bubble!

Not everybody lives and breathes serverless or even containers. Most clouds are still made of virtual machines.

architect for change!

If you get the chance to start fresh, make sure your environment is architected with change in mind. You don’t want another monolith that you can’t easily change.

automation is key!

You need to automate wherever you can. This is how you show your value. This is how you make time for more interesting work. This is how you do not get woken up in the middle of the night because a server died.

Get in touch

We are here to help you with all these points. Whether you want to assess your current environment for opportunities or need assistance moving your workloads in the cloud, but the right way, we are here to help.
Get in touch!

Close

Super small Azure toolset

---

Swiss knife Azure toolset with Linux

Run all the containers

I do not like installing tools on my laptop, mainly because I do not want to get attached to my laptop.
Around 3 years ago I read Jess Frazelle’s blog article on how and why she runs all her desktop apps in docker containers, find it here https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/. As I am running Windows on my laptop I never really got any further than running Chrome in a container, without audio.
What I did take away though was that I am only going to install the bare minimum of stuff onto my laptop, everything that can be run in a container, will be run in a container.

Read the full article on David’s blog.

Close

Configure diagnostics on Microsoft Azure SQL

---

Azure SQL - Logs and metrics

Right click - deploy.
Copy a file to the server.
Lift and shift your on-premises server to the cloud.
What do these practices usually have in common?
Yes, the lack of production readiness in the cloud. Lack of service logging and metrics collection.
Something as important as this is usually either overlooked, not done at all, or overcomplicated, by using 3rd party tools that are “cloud-ready”, all you need to do is just install this agent here on all your machines so it can forward data to this other server which then forwards all the data to another server. Wow!
Azure makes log and metrics collection super easy on most services, with an almost turnkey solution to forward logs and metrics to an Azure Storage Account, Event Hub or Log Analytics.
All three targets should be an ideal source for any cloud based SIEM tool to ingest data from, if you decided to use a 3rd party.

Read the full article on David’s blog.

Close

New Blog

---

News and tech articles around Microsoft Azure

We will be continuously posting interesting articles around the latest announcements on Microsoft Azure and what they mean to you as a customer. On top of that we will also post technical articles explaining how Azure services work or how to solve specific problems on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

Stay tuned!

Close

training

Do you want to offer your employees a training that enables them to come back and actually implement what they learned straight away?
Do you want training that is fitted to your company’s or team’s needs?

An example of available trainings are:

• Introduction of cloud deployment principles (DevOps)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, ARM templaces, GCP Deployment Manager, AWS CloudFormation)
• Building SOEs (golden images) in the cloud
• CI/CD pipelines for build and deploy (infrastructure and applications)
• Monitoring of cloud workloads
• Cost management in the cloud
• PowerShell (various levels)

Private Azure trainings

If you prefer to have a training strictly for your team based on your exact needs and requirements. We can help.
The process involves an up to 2 hour workshop with you where we assess your current situation (people!, tools and processes) and together create the scope for the training.
This will enable your team to apply learnings to their own environment and even to their own use cases or current challenges.

Next step
Get in touch with us via the contact form, let’s get a coffee!

Close

Microservices

You are building a new application or product and are thinking about utilising a microservices architecture?
Or are you currently running a monolith and want to know how to redesign it in a microservices architecture?
Is it containers you are thinking of?
We have successfully helped customers solve the hard problems going down this transformative path.

Next step Get in touch with us via the contact form, let’s get a coffee!

Close

cloud

Cloud projects have a lot of moving parts and a lot needs to be considered when designing one’s future cloud environment.
With experience on all three major cloud providers (Azure, AWS and Google) and a Microsoft MVP for Microsoft Azure on staff we are in the best position to help you make your project a success.
For us, Security in the cloud is not an afterthought, we build it into our designs so that you can be comfortable hosting your workloads on the Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS or Google (GCP) cloud.
With proven DevOps and SRE principles we will make sure that you are always in control of your cloud environment, and not the other way around.

Our offerings

• Greenfield cloud implementation design (subscription design)
• Contemporary Lift & Shift from on-premises to the cloud
  • No bill-shock!
• Transformation of traditional workloads into cloud-aware workloads, e.g
  • Windows infrastructure servers
  • Containerisation (docker / kubernetes) of Web Applications
• Assessment / review of cloud designs

Next step
Get in touch with us via the contact form, let’s get a coffee!

Close