Azure

Intelligently scheduling cloud data pipelines based on carbon impact can optimize both environmental sustainability and operational efficiency.

Intelligently scheduling cloud data pipelines based on carbon impact can optimize both environmental sustainability and operational efficiency.

Intelligently scheduling cloud data pipelines based on carbon impact can optimize both environmental sustainability and operational efficiency.

Intelligently scheduling cloud data pipelines based on carbon impact can optimize both environmental sustainability and operational efficiency.

Learn how to access multi-select choice column choice labels from Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse using PySpark or SQL.

Learn how to access the choice labels from Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse using T-SQL through SQL Serverless and by using Spark SQL in a Synapse Notebook.

Learn how to access the choice labels from Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse using PySpark.

This blog post explores interactive notebooks in Azure Databricks. An Azure Databricks Notebook is a powerful data science tool that support exploratory data analysis, hypothesis testing, data cleaning and transformation, data visualisation, statistical modeling and machine learning.

Microsoft Fabric unifies Power BI, Data Factory & Data Lake on Synapse infrastructure, reducing cost & time while enabling citizen data science.

Explore OneLake, Microsoft Fabric's core storage for data in Azure & other clouds. Discover its role in Fabric workloads, the OneDrive equivalent for data storage.

Microsoft Fabric unifies data & analytics, building on Azure Synapse Analytics for improved data-level interoperability. Explore its offerings & pros/cons.

Discover the use of Synapse Notebooks in Azure Synapse Analytics for data analysis, cleaning, visualization, and machine learning.

Performing certain deployment operations from a cloud-based CI/CD agent against resources that are only accessible via private networking are problematic. The often-cited solution is to use your own hosted agents that are also connected to the same private networks, however, this introduces additional costs and maintenance overhead. This post discusses an approach that combines the use of cloud-based CI/CD agents with 'just-in-time' allow-listing as an alternative to operating your own private agents.

This blog shows how to transform a document based format to a tabular format whilst managing all the nested properties

Learn to configure AAD or MSA 2FA profiles for UI automation testing with Time-based One-Time Passwords.

Explore Dapr for cloud migration & use Visual Studio container tools to debug containerized services.

A short rundown of why you need the ForwardedHeadersMiddleware when using Azure Container Apps to host an ASP.NET Core MVC app requiring authentication

In the sixth and final post we draw our conclusions about migrating an application from Azure Functions to Azure Container Apps.

Explore Dapr for cloud migration & simplify containerized dev inner-loop using Visual Studio with the Dapr Traffic Control sample application.

The fifth in a series of posts talking about how and why we migrated an application from Azure Functions to Azure Container Apps

Explore Custom Objects in Lake Databases for user-friendly column names, calculated columns, and pre-defined queries in Azure Synapse Analytics.

The fourth post migrating an app from Azure Functions to Azure Container Apps we examine the challenges around authentication and CORS

Explore Lake Databases in Azure Synapse Analytics: analyze Dataverse data, share Spark tables, and design models with Database Templates.

Many data projects fail to deliver the impact they should for a simple reason – they focus on the data. This series of posts explains a different way of thinking that will set up your data & analytics projects for success. Using an iterative, action-oriented, insight discovery process, it demonstrates tools and techniques that will help you to identify, define and prioritize requirements in your own projects so that they deliver maximum value. It also explores the synergy with modern cloud analytics platforms like Azure Synapse, explaining how the process and the architecture actively support each other for fast, impactful delivery.

The third in a series of posts talking about how and why we migrated an application from Azure Functions to Azure Container Apps

Discover a unique, action-oriented approach to data projects for maximum impact. Learn how to prioritize requirements and leverage cloud analytics platforms.

This series focuses on maximizing data projects' impact via an iterative, insight discovery process, and synergy with cloud platforms like Azure Synapse.

The second in a series of posts talking about how and why we migrated an application from Azure Functions to Azure Container Apps

Discover a unique, action-oriented approach to data projects for maximum impact. Learn how to synergize with platforms like Azure Synapse for fast delivery.

Many data projects fail to deliver the impact they should for a simple reason – they focus on the data. This series of posts explains a different way of thinking that will set up your data & analytics projects for success. Using an iterative, action-oriented, insight discovery process, it demonstrates tools and techniques that will help you to identify, define and prioritize requirements in your own projects so that they deliver maximum value. It also explores the synergy with modern cloud analytics platforms like Azure Synapse, explaining how the process and the architecture actively support each other for fast, impactful delivery.

Discover a unique, action-oriented approach to data projects for maximum impact. Learn how to synergize with platforms like Azure Synapse for fast delivery.

The first in a series of posts talking about how and why we migrated an application from Azure Functions to Azure Container Apps

Automate Excel tasks with Office Scripts & Power Automate. Get an overview and explore a practical example in this post.

Fix broken dev loop with containerized apps on Azure CLI for Windows. Learn a workaround to avoid using outdated Azure CLI versions.

Learn how to grant non-admin users access to Spark synchronized objects with SQL Serverless in Synapse Analytics using the Shared Metadata Model.

If you're interested in the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) and how it can simplify migrating existing workloads to use cloud platform services, then this series might be for you. In this post, we continue modifying the excellent Dapr Traffic Control sample application by swapping the MQTT-based messaging with Azure Storage Queues. We will also look at how you can use the Dapr programming model as an alternative to cloud-provider SDKs.

Explore Azure Synapse's 'Shared Metadata Model' feature. Learn how it syncs Spark tables with SQL Serverless, its benefits, and tradeoffs.

Explore DAPR's role in migrating workloads to cloud services, focusing on integrating Azure Key Vault for secrets management.

Explore monetizing APIs with our guide. We offer strategies, videos, and code via Azure API Management to fast-track your business model.

Explore DAX queries for scenario-based testing in Power BI reports to ensure data model validity, rule adherence, and security maintenance.

Explore the benefits of Power BI's new ExecuteQueries REST API for developers in tooling, process, and integrations.

Explore Dapr for migrating workloads to cloud services. Learn to enable PaaS Pub-Sub with Azure Service Bus using the Dapr Traffic Control sample app.

Explore Dapr's role in simplifying cloud migration using Azure services, based on the Dapr Traffic Control sample app.

Bicep provides a significant improvement in tooling for organisations seeking to deploy infrastructure as code on Microsoft Azure.

Explore Azure Synapse's SQL Serverless for on-demand data lake queries, its benefits, and challenges in managing schemas and maintaining data sync.

Deploy a VueJS app on Azure Static Web Apps using a YAML-defined Azure DevOps pipeline with Microsoft's hosting solution for static web applications.

Carmel has recently released an exam tips course on preparing for the AZ-204 exam: Developing solutions for Microsoft Azure! The course gives an overview of the syllabus, some tips on what you'll need to know for each section, and some examples of common question types.

TL;DR - Using Azure Synapse SQL Serverless, you can query Azure Data Lake and populate Power BI reports across multiple workspaces.

Explore data with Azure Synapse's interactive Spark notebooks, integrated with Pipelines & monitoring tools. Learn how to add tests for business rule validation.

The first in a series of posts talking about how to best work with configuration in Azure Functions

Discover Azure Data Factory's null-safe operator for referencing activity outputs that may not always exist. Learn to use it effectively.

A rundown of how to trigger an Azure Synapse pipeline run from C# code.

Modern analytics requires a multi-faceted approach, which can cause integration headaches. Azure Synapse's Swiss army knife approach can remove a lot of friction.

Fix the "You need permission" error in Azure Synapse Analytics with this guide, addressing its causes and solutions for Data Engineers/Developers.

Assign roles in Synapse Studio for Azure Synapse Analytics devs using Azure CLI. Accessible by Owners/Contributors of the resource.

Explore Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB's impact on 'full stack serverless', No-ETL, and pay-as-you-query analytics.

Wishing Azure Synapse Analytics had support for SQL notebooks? Fear not, it's easy to take advantage rich interactive notebooks for SQL Pools and SQL on Demand.

Tracking down unexpected allocations in a high-performance .NET parsing library.

Explore an alternative "invite user" flow for Azure AD B2C, simplifying authentication without custom policies in SaaS applications.

Explore deploying Azure Synapse Analytics workspaces using ARM templates, a popular infrastructure deployment method for organizations.

Learn to encrypt data in your app using C# and Azure SDK libraries, and secure keys with Azure Key Vault. Discover the easy setup process in this blog.

Carmel recently passed the 'Az-204 - Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure' exam. Here she shares how she went about preparing!

Serverless data architectures enable leaner data insights and operations. How do you reap the rewards while avoiding the potential pitfalls?

I was recently invited on to Microsoft Mechanics to talk about the new on-demand SQL Serverless offering within Azure Synapse. If you have been following along with my previous blog posts you will know that we've been hard at work applying Azure Synapse against real customer workloads. In the video I take you through the service by solving a real-world IoT problem for one of our telco customers.

New Azure Synapse Analytics service offers SQL Serverless for on-demand data lake queries. We tested its potential as a Data Lake Analytics replacement.

Did you know that Azure Synapse has great support for .NET and #csharp? Learning new languages is often a barrier to digital transformation, being able to use existing people, skills, tools and engineering disciplines can be a massive advantage.

Discover a technique for setting up multiple, concurrent authenticated sessions using azure-cli in this post.

Explore why Microsoft's new Spark offering in Azure Synapse Analytics is a game-changer for Azure Databricks investors.

Explore 5 key reasons to choose Azure Synapse Analytics for your cloud data needs, based on years of experience in driving customer outcomes.

Whilst "read/write XMLA endpoint" might seem like a technical mouthful, its addition to Power BI is a significant milestone in the strategy of bringing Power BI and Analysis Services closer together. As well as closing the gap between IT-managed workloads and self-service BI, it presents a number of new opportunities for Power BI developers in terms of tooling, process and integrations. This post highlights some of the key advantages of this new capability and what they mean for the Power BI developer.

Azure Key Vault safeguards encryption keys & secrets for secure data access. It offers isolated storage, AD integration, RBAC, and access policies.

Ensure Power BI report quality by connecting to tabular models, executing scenario-based specs, and validating data, business rules, and security.

Jess and Carmel recently gave a talk at Azure Oxford on Combatting illegal fishing with Machine Learning and Azure - for less than £10 / month. The recording of that talk is now available for viewing!The talk focuses on the recent work we completed with OceanMind. They run through how to construct a cloud-first architecture based on serverless and data analytics technologies and explore the important principles and challenges in designing this kind of solution. Finally, we see how the architecture we designed through this process not only provides all the benefits of the cloud (reliability, scalability, security), but because of the pay-as-you-go compute model, has a compute cost that we could barely believe!

Ensure reliable insights with endjin's automated quality gates for validating Power BI Dataflows in complex solutions.

Explore Azure Analysis Services for scalable analytics. Control costs via automation with Powershell & Azure DevOps in multi-environment setups.

Endjin's blog post details their project with OceanMind, using a serverless architecture and machine learning to detect illegal fishing.

Learn how to update Azure Analysis Services model schemas in .NET apps using AMO SDK for user-driven analysis.

Wardley Maps are a fantastic tool to help provide situational awareness, in order to help you make better decisions. We use Wardley Maps to help our customers think about the various benefits and trade-offs that can be made when migrating to the Cloud. In this blog post, Jess Panni demonstrates how we used Wardley Maps to plan the migration of OceanMind to Microsoft Azure, and how the maps highlighted where the core value of their platform was, and how PaaS and Serverless services offered the most value for money for the organisation.

If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you'll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the final post in this series, we show how to ensure specs written using Corvus.Testing can run as part of your build pipeline.

If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you'll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the fourth of this series of posts, we look at how configuration can be supplied from your tests to the functions apps being tested.

If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you'll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the third of a series of posts, we look at using classes in the Corvus.Testing library to run functions apps via scenario and feature hooks.

If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you'll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the second of a series of posts, we look at using step bindings provided by the Corvus.Testing library to run functions apps as part of your SpecFlow scenarios.

If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you'll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the first of a series of posts, we look at some different approaches to testing your functions apps, and introduce the Corvus.Testing library.

Learn to use Azure Analysis Services in custom apps via REST API in .NET for efficient async model refreshes.

Explore endjin's high-performance .NET AIS parser, developed for OceanMind, used for tracking commercial ships.

Explore endless possibilities with dynamic DAX queries in C# for Azure Analysis Services integration in custom apps using the provided code samples.

The theme of this year's British Science Week (6 - 15 March 2020) is "Our Diverse Planet". We'll be getting involved by speaking to school children about the work we've been doing with Oxfordshire-based OceanMind (part of the Microsoft AI for Good programme) to help them combat illegal fishing, hopefully inspiring some of the next generation of data scientists!

The Azure CNAB Quickstart Templates we've created are only half the story. Much of the work we've done over the last few months involved the authoring, contribution and DevOps pipelines required to support an open source project. The project is inspired by the original Azure Quickstart Templates - which over the last 5 years has grown to over 850 templates. In this post we're going to explain how you can author CNAB templates and contribute them.

Porter: a CNAB-based tool for building, managing, and installing app bundles. Learn to set up Porter on Windows with this guide.

In partnership with Microsoft, we have released Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library on GitHub. CNAB (Cloud-Native Application Bundle) is a new specification designed for facilitating the packaging, installation, upgrading and uninstallation of cloud-native solutions in the cloud, on-premise or on the edge. We've created a number of quickstarts covering Apache Airflow, Azure Kubernetes Service, Ghost, Kubeflow, SQL Server Always On and Wordpress to help demonstrate the power of CNAB and Porter.

Discover how Kubernetes, Azure Durable Functions, and Azure API Management transform legacy batch processing code into a RESTful API.

Explore .NET querying methods for integrating Azure Analysis Services beyond data querying into dynamic UIs and APIs.

Learn to integrate Azure Analysis Services in apps by establishing server connections. Follow this guide with code samples for essential scenarios.

Ed attended NDC London 2020, along with many of his endjin colleagues. In this post he summarises and reflects upon his favourite sessions of the conference including; "OWASP Top Ten proactive controls" by Jim Manico, "There's an Impostor in this room!" by Angharad Edwards, "How to code music?" by Laura Silvanavičiūtė, "ML and the IoT: Living on the Edge" by Brandon Satrom, "Common API Security Pitfalls" by Philippe De Ryck, and "Combatting illegal fishing with Machine Learning and Azure - for less than £10 / month" by Jess Panni & Carmel Eve.

Along with several of my endjin colleagues, I attended NDC London in January this year - here's a run through of the sessions I attended on Day 3 and my thoughts. This final day was a mixed bag, taking in talks on drumming and AKKA.net, as well as something a bit more close to home - a session from endjin's own Jess Panni and Carmel Eve on our recent project for OceanMind.

Along with several of my endjin colleagues, I attended NDC London in January this year - here's a run through of the sessions I attended on Day 2 and my thoughts. This day was UI heavy, with sessions on Vuejs and UI testing, but I also learned more about GraphQL and writing high performance C# code.

A retrospective of my first day at NDC London 2020, taking in sessions on AI and Machine Learning, Capability Mapping, Micro Frontends, Diagnostics and Blazor.

Explore Azure Analysis Services in custom apps using SDKs, PowerShell cmdlets & REST APIs. Learn to choose the right framework in this guide.

Explore Azure Analysis Services' versatility in bespoke analysis products & processes, and learn how it can unlock data insights beyond traditional BI.

Endjin attended Microsoft's AI for Good hackathon at the IET in London, highlighting the potential of tech to amplify good deeds.

In this blog we discuss building a secure data solution using Azure Data Lake. Data Lake has many features which enable fine grained security and data separation. It is also built on Azure Storage which enables us to take advantage of all of those features and means that ADLS is still a cost effective storage option!This post runs through some of the great features of ADLS and runs through an example of how we build our solutions using this technology!

In January 2020, Carmel is speaking about creating high performance geospatial algorithms in C# which can detect suspicious vessel activity, which is used to help alert law enforcement to illegal fishing. The input data is fed from Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2, and converted into data projections optimised for high-performance computation. This code is then hosted in Azure Functions for cheap, consumption based processing.

Are you configuring your Azure App Service to use a VNet? The regional VNet integration for an Azure App Service is a preview feature, and so comes with some quirks. One of the documented limitations of this preview feature is that "The feature is only available from newer App Service scale units that support PremiumV2 App Service plans." This has interesting implications as to how you need to deploy your App Service, otherwise you could end up with a rather perplexing pattern of errors. Read about how we came about this error, and how we ended up fixing it.

GitHub Actions is GitHub's new CI/CD platform. It is comparable with Azure Pipelines, which forms part of the Azure DevOps suite. In this post, Mike Larah looks at the similarities and differences in the high-level concepts and terminology between the two platforms.

Explore Azure Durable Functions as an alternative to long-running operations, overcoming HTTP Triggers' 230s limit in Azure Load Balancer.

Remote working allows us to work from anywhere we want. This brings a huge amount of flexibility in freedom, however we do need the help of a working laptop! When Carmel's laptop gave in just before a trip, she used Azure DevTestLabs to allow her to continue to work using a 10 year old Mac that probably couldn't wouldn't have been up to the task alone...

Running an Azure Function in a Docker container on Raspberry Pi 4 with this step-by-step guide and ready-to-use code for your projects.

Explore how to build secure solutions on Azure using Azure Functions and Managed Identities, eliminating the need for storing credentials.

Explore using AzureAD with Az module in PowerShell Core, as Az may not fully replace AzureAD. Learn to utilize both for optimal functionality.

Automate Power BI workspaces creation & security using PowerShell & Azure DevOps pipelines in a wider DevOps strategy with Azure data platform services.

Explore data analysis & ETL with Databricks Notebooks on Azure. Utilize Spark's unified analytics engine for big data & ML, and integrate with ADF pipelines.

Mapping Data Flows are a relatively new feature of ADF. They allow you to visually build up complex data transformation sequences. This can aid in the streamlining of data manipulation and ETL processes, without the need to write any code! This post gives a brief introduction to the technology, and what this could enable!

Explore the lack of a native Azure Data Factory connector for Snowflake and discover alternatives for integration between these popular platforms.

Explore Azure Policy for proper tagging on resources and enabling tag inheritance from parent resource groups.

Fix DLL locking errors in Azure Function deployment by using "deploy from package" option. This runs the function from a package file, resolving issues.

Using PowerShell and the VM Custom Script Extension to download and execute scripts on existing Azure VMs

Explore Azure Active Directory's key concepts: AAD apps, service principles, managed identities, with setup examples.

If you're using the Gremlin API for Cosmos DB, you can now see how much each operation costs in Request Units.

Ian Griffiths recently joined endjin as a Technical Fellow. We had a long fireside chat, which has been broken down into a 5 part series covering .NET, the Cloud, AI, ML, teaching software engineering, and why he joined endjin.

The OpenAPI SDK based OpenAPI document converters extension has been updated to support Visual Studio 2017.

Read how we set up Azure spending alerts and saved over $10k

We have lots of experience working with Azure Cosmos DB, and we're sharing some of our knowledge at Microsoft's Future Decoded event.

Explore the importance of API strategy, governance, security, and design in Digital Transformation projects.

We've been helping customers adopt Microsoft Azure since 2010, we have produced a lot of thought leadership to help people think about the steps required, the risk involved and how to plan a successful adoption.

We've just released an updated version of our Azure Technology Selector poster - helping you to choose the right Azure service, based on your use-case.

There were so many good sessions at Microsoft BUILD 2017, we selected our highlights of sessions that you should make time to catch up with.

Learn to build a Power BI dashboard using DirectQuery and ElasticQuery across multiple databases with Alice Waddicor.

In the third and final part in this series we compare the risk of Azure vs the risk of on-premise data centres, using the Swiss Cheese Risk Model.

Implement using parameters in Resource Manager templates for optional resource deployment and configuration.

Read about how we set up automated backups of our office security camera footage and used Power Automate to alert us if anything went wrong

Explore AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform's offerings for cloud migration. Understand their services for your specific needs.

This post shows how to add a Power BI Embedded report to an ASP.NET Core application.

In the second part of this series, we take a deep dive into the Swiss Cheese Model and show how this type of threat modelling is essential for understanding the risks that adopting Microsoft Azure post your organisation, and how you mitigate them.

Did you know that you can fully automate the bootstrapping process of setting up an Azure DevOps enviornment? This post shows you how.

In the world of DevOps, cloud and platform services, how does a developer's "definition of done" need to change? This post argues that as the silos of development and operations are broken down, the responsibility of understanding the whole solution increases meaning, to truly take advantage of the cloud, the need for quality and professionalism is critical for success.

Learn how to combine the power of Azure Resource Manager and Octopus Deploy for a frictionless Azure DevOps experience.

In the first part of this series, we look at how you take a strategic look at the risks of adopting Microsoft Azure, and how you report these to C-level execs.

Explore creating and testing an Azure ML Studio web service using Postman for efficient machine learning model production.

Meta-Runners allow you to easily create reusable build components for TeamCity, in this post I demonstrate how to create a Meta-Runner to create Azure Application Insights Release Annotations.

We've improved our approach for saving money by turning off our virtual machines outside of office hours. This post explored how to do it using graphical runbooks.

We have produced an insightful booklet called "Embracing Disruption - Financial Services and the Microsoft Cloud" which examines the challenges and opportunities for the Financial Service Industry in the UK, through the lens of Microsoft Azure, Security, Privacy & Data Sovereignty, Data Ingestion, Transformation & Enrichment, Big Compute, Big Data, Insights & Visualisation, Infrastructure, Ops & Support, and the API Economy.

Hymans Robertson was set up in Glasgow in 1921 and is one of the longest established independent firms of consultants and actuaries in the UK. Hymans Robertson soon realised that the computational requirements of their models exceeded the capacity of their on-premise datacentres and that the most cost effective solution would be to use the cloud to perform their Big Compute. But before they could harness the cloud to help them solve their Big Data problems, the business needed to understand the ramifications of moving to the cloud; everything from regulatory, risk and compliance concerns,  to how their internal Ops team would need to evolve and adapt, and how to deal with moving data from on-prem into the cloud.

There is a lot of hype about the blockchain - usually wrapped up with talk about Bitcoin and crypto-currencies. In this article, we look at its impact on trust, and auditability in financial services, and why it may (or may not) be appropriate for your solutions.

In this post we review the FCA's guidelines for the adoption of cloud services by FinTech businesses, and help you to understand their impact across the value chain.

To celebrate FinTech Week, we've released an eBook based our our talk about Disruption in Financial Services at Future Decoded.

Learn how to authenticate against Azure Resource Manager using PowerShell, for fully automated deployments.

We've reached our first milestone - a whole year of publishing Azure Weekly. To celebrate we're giving away stuff!

Consumption based pricing is a one of the USPs of Cloud PaaS services, but the default settings aren't necessarily optimised for cost. Significant savings can be made from understanding your workload.

Explore Azure Resource Manager and PowerShell Desired State Configuration for provisioning and configuring Azure virtual machines.

We recently completed a technical proof of concept to see if the new Azure Batch service could scale to meet the demands of a Big Compute workload.

We use SpecFlow to write integration tests against Azure. In this post we share an Open Source SpecFlow extension for the Azure Storage Emulator.

A CDN, short for Content Delivery Network, is essentially a network of servers set-up, in various geographic locations, with the aim of speeding up the delivery of content to end-users across the Internet.

Everything in Azure runs in Coordinated Universal Time; learn how to deal with Daylight saving time in Azure Automation, so your jobs still run on time.

You can easily visualise data stored in Azure Table Storage in Power BI. This guide shows you how.

If you have private NuGet feeds, restoring packages during a CI/CD process can be a challenge. This post provides a solution when working with Azure App Service.

Just because you're using the cloud, doesn't mean you don't use traditional DTAP environments. But you do need to configure your cloud services to understand them.

In this post we demonstrate how to use New Relic to monitor an Azure Cloud Service Worker Role, step by step.

To help guide the client through the selection process (and to act as an aide memoire when we come to try and remember why particular choices were made), we created a handy flow-chart to take you through the technology landscape, and suggest some recommended-practice solutions.

Explore how to use Azure Automation for running VMs during office hours. Learn to create runbooks for automated tasks at pre-defined times.

Learn how to use diagnostics in Azure Virtual Machines and Cloud Service Web or Worker Roles using the Azure SDK.

Discover cloud computing's pay-as-you-use model and how turning off VMs outside office hours can save costs.

We've delivered a number of Elasticsearch solutions on Azure. In this second post in the series, we share some useful tips.

Azure Weekly is our FREE weekly newsletter containing a round up of all the news and interesting blog posts about the Azure ecosystem.

We have started to publish a FREE weekly newsletter covering all the latest news about the Microsoft Azure ecosystem

We created an an automated, telephony-based candidate interviewing system using .NET and Azure. We used New Relic and Twilio to simplify first line support. In this post we delve into some of the technical details.

By utilising the IP and Domain Restrictions feature in IIS, it is possible to lock down your Azure Website to only allow access to IP addresses and domains that you have specified in a accept list. Learn how in this post.

We've built a number of Elasticsearch clusters on Microsoft Azure. This blog post contains some of our top tips and gotchas.

Learn how to use PowerShell Remoting to connect to an Azure Virtual Machine; a useful technique for managing servers like cattle, not pets.

A quick tip on fixing a 'remote desktop could not connect' error on Azure Virtual Machines.

This post shows how to use your Office 365 SMTP relay to enable email notification from TeamCity and YouTrack hosted in Azure.

If you use Azure Management Studio, you can quickly setup your connections by importing your publish settings...

A quick tip for updating your Azure cloud service configuration while running in the emulator

We've just released a free Cloud Migration Process poster to help you understand the complexities of evaluating & executing different cloud migration strategies.

Some thoughts on RavenDB after using it to build a content-managed website.