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Ned in the Cloud LLC – Six Month Check-in

Posted on by nedbellavance

Six Month Check-In: Cruisin’

In May of 2018, I decided to start my own company (Ned in the Cloud LLC), quit my lucrative consulting job, and hang my own shingle for content creation, education, and technical writing. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I actually decided to strike out on my own in September of 2018, it just took me until May of 2019 to do it. I won’t rehash the entire thing now. If you want to hear the whole story, check out my detailed post or this episode of The Full Stack Journey podcast.

So how are things going six months later? In a word. Awesome. That’s all you wanted to know? Sweet, thanks for reading.

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OH. You’re still here? Neat! Here’s what’s been going on since my post back in August.

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Microsoft Ignite 2019 – The Great Marketing Shift

Posted on by nedbellavance

The Ennui of Success

In 2018, I attended Microsoft Ignite and one of the things I noticed during the keynote was how stale everything seemed. Satya appeared to not only be lacking in excitement, but also clearly overcompensating by trying to be super excited about boring things. It was painful to watch and I thought perhaps we were witnessing the beginning of the end for Satya’s tenure as the CEO of Microsoft. His mission in many ways had been accomplished. The culture at Microsoft had been irrevocably altered, the product direction and priorities shifted to accommodate our service based economy, and their market cap was set to crest $1 trillion. If Satya was planning to leave on a high note, this would definitely qualify.

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Using Ultra SSD Storage with Azure Kubernetes Service

Posted on by nedbellavance

In a previous post, I performed a storage performance benchmark of Azure Managed Disks and Azure Files for Azure Kubernetes Service. The testing included the now generally available Ultra SSD class of Managed Disk. The process for using Ultra SSD with AKS was fraught with peril, caveats, and an assist from the AKS product group to get it all working. I thought I would detail how I went about enabling Ultra SSDs with AKS in case someone else was struggling with the same.

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Azure NetApp Files Performance with Azure Kubernetes Service

Posted on by nedbellavance

In April of 2018, I was delegate for Cloud Field Day 3. One of the presenters was NetApp, and they showed off a few different services they had under development in the cloud space. In a previous post I went over the services in some detail, so I won’t regurgitate all that now. One of the services that was still in private preview at the time was NetApp Files for Azure. The idea was relatively simple, NetApp would place their hardware in Azure datacenters and configure the hardware to support multi-tenancy and provisioning through the Azure Resource Manager. That solution is now generally available, and I was curious how it would perform in comparison with the other storage options for the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). In this post I will detail out my testing methodology, the performance results, and some thoughts on which storage makes the most sense for different workload types.

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Demystifying Azure AD Service Principals

Posted on by nedbellavance

Anyone who’s worked with Azure for a bit has encountered the need to create a service principal. If you are an IT Ops person, you probably equate an SP with a service account in local Active Directory. If you’re more of an application developer, then you may have created an SP as part of your application in Azure, because you want to give that application permissions to Azure resources. The purpose of this post is to tease apart what service principals are, how they interact with application objects, and all the myriad ways to create an SP on Azure.

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