Infrastructure as Code with CloudFormation

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.
Read full post

Use Microsoft Graph API to extract Excel file contents

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.
Read full post

Understand OAuth and Open ID Connect

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.
Read full post

How did I pass AWS Solution Architect Professional Exam in just 3 weeks

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.
Read full post

Deploy Docker Image with AWS ECS (Part 2)

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.
Read full post