Recently I was working on a server migration task, which is to move a Windows IIS web server to AWS. The server’s sole purpose is to redirect bunch of the short URLs to some of the most frequently used long URLs. E.g. if user type in “o365/“ in browser, it will be redirected to https://portal.office365.com. Instead of uplifting the whole Windows server to AWS, I have decided to use a Linux server with Apache to replace this box.

Recently I was working on automating a process that extracts contents from a Excel spreadsheet stored in Office 365 SharePoint Online. It took me quite sometime to figure out how to get this done. I thought there must be people out there looking for the same thing. Hence here is the post. Based on the requirements, the Excel file needs to be shared among few specified staff. They should be able to modify the spreadsheet with their Office 365 accounts.

IT world is always full of buzz words. “Digital Transformation”, “Automation”, “Blockchain”, “AI”, “Machine Learning”, etc, etc… We like to talk about them all the time, to show that we are not out of touch, we are up to date. Although I have to admit some of those words are used so often yet so few people have the really proper understanding of the actual technologies themselves. I believe OAuth is one of them.

This post will be a bit different from my usual technical walk through. I recently passed AWS Solution Architect Professional exam with just three weeks of preparation. In this post, I want to share my experience with the exam itself as well as how I prepared for it. Hopefully you will find it somewhat useful. I booked the exam on 1st Oct 2018. Honestly I didn’t expect myself to pass at that time.

In Part 1 we uploaded a Docker image to AWS ECR. In this post, we will complete building the ECS Cluster and deploy the container image onto the cluster. Note: The lab I worked on was recreated. The container image was renamed from webfront to testweb. Before we start, you need to understand some ECS basic concepts. Task Definition A task definition describes one or more containers, their relationships, how they should be launched etc.

Recently I came across an issue on our Hyper-V Cluster. One of the VM was stuck in the “Stopping” state. I had to force the VM to shutdown by kill its process on the Hyper-V host. To do so, I first find out the VM’s GUID and then kill the process with the same GUID. Needless to say, the whole process can be achieved with the PowerShell commands below. \# Get the VM GUID and find the process with the GUID $VM \= Get-VM \-Name $VMName \-ErrorAction Stop $VMGUID \= $VM.

There are a lot ARM templates out there can do this. But in this post, we will go through the nitty gritty of using DSC to automate the PDC setup. Before we begin, I assume you already know what DSC is and does. Otherwise, check it out here. First, let’s build a new VM in Azure with these PowerShell commands. In this case, the VM will have direct Internet and can be accessed via Internet directly.

Here are the steps I took to get AWS CLI installed on my WSL Ubuntu. Before we install AWS CLI package itself, we need to get Python package manager pip installed first. Download pip install script. Notice I use –k here, this is because I am running this behind company proxy, the proxy changes HTTPS certificate to its own certificate. Without –k the command will fail. You can leave it out if you have direct Internet access

One of the things I have been working on is to help our developers to containerize their applications and deploy them to AWS ECS. In this post, I will walk through the steps to upload a Docker image to AWS ECR (Elastic Container Repository). As the first step, we need to provision the ECR with CloudFormation template. Below is a simple CFN template written in YAML. AWSTemplateFormatVersion: "2010-09-09" Description: \> Play stack Parameters: RepoName: Default: tomrepo Description: ECR Repoistory Name Type: String \# required ConstraintDescription: must be a name Resources: myrepo: Type: AWS::ECR::Repository Properties: RepositoryName: !

Do you ever find yourself face this kind the situation: You are told to provision new resources with ARM templates to an existing resource group that already has VMs and vNets built and running. How can you add new subnets and VMs to the resource group without breaking those ones already there? Unlike AWS Cloud Formation Templates, Microsoft ARM Templates do not provide “Update” option for past deployments. In order to modify the existing environment, the usual option is to make the change through CLI, PowerShell or Azure portal.