Authenticate against Ghost with cURL

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo / Unsplash To automate the pipeline of the theme I use for my blog to be built and automatically deployed it is required to interact with the Ghost API. Nothing fancy. This writeup explains how to retrieve the Bearer token through the Ghost API with cURL.…

Publish to social with Logic Apps

Photo by rawpixel / Unsplash I like to share on LinkedIn and asked myself why I’m not sharing the articles I write for my blog. The you-just-have-to-do-it factor, plain laziness and lack of time are the primary reasons why I have not posted links to LinkedIn so far.…

Azure Security Center per-hour billing

Photo by rawpixel / Unsplash Currently billing for Azure Security Center is reported on a per-node, per-month basis. Starting July 1st 2018 this reporting will be changed to per-node, per-hour to achieve more granularity in billing. Billing is still pro-rated thus you’ll only pay for the time a node was actually using the service.…

Azure Active Directory Login for Ubuntu VMs in preview

Centralized integration with an identity provider is a common ask. It provides increased security and removes the reliance on out-of-band managed user accounts. It is now possible to configure Azure Active Directory login for Ubuntu-based VMs (16.04 LTS & 17.10) through the Device Flow authentication process.…

Azure Monitor Container Health Public Preview

Photo by frank mckenna / Unsplash Monitoring the container infrastructure which is running your applications is important. With the emergence of managed Kubernetes such as Aure Container Service (AKS) this becomes more tricky as part of the infrastructure is managed by somebody else.…

Using Update Management in Isolated Environments

Almost all Azure management services run in/for any cloud. Among them is Update Management which automates OS patching for both Linux and Windows machines whether they are running on-premises, in Azure or in other clouds. Security is an essential item for most customers.…

Azure Security Center cost for stopped VMs

An interesting question came up in a conversation today: How are the costs for Azure Security Center Standard pricing tier calculated for nodes that are stopped? It is pretty easy: Azure Security Center Standard pricing tier is prorated daily so that only the days where a particular VM was online are counted towards the monthly price.…

Azure Policy: Mapping Audit Log Events to Policy Objects

Azure Policy is a great tool to define governance controls in Azure. With addition of the compliance pieces this feature which was part of Azure for quite some time finally had it’s appearance on main stage (deep dive on implementing governance at scale in this video from Ignite 2017 by Joseph Chan and Liz Kim)…