I tortured Azure in the Week-End

In my last blog post, I showed how to author an Azure Runbook to turn VMs up and down.

In order to test it I did put a schedule where at every hour (e.g. 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, etc.) it would start the VMs and at every pass half hour (e.g. 1:30, 2:30, 3:30, etc.).

The thing is that I...

Shutting down VMs on schedule in Azure

I thought it was time for a post on the quintessential automation task:  shutting down VMs & starting them on a schedule.

UPDATE (Nov-27th 2016):  this particular task is now available directly in the VM portal (at least the shut down part of it).  This article remains interesting to look at a complete example of Azure Automation.

This is a...

Using Azure Active Directory Service Principal

You need an Azure Active Directory (AAD) identity to run some of your services:  perhaps an Azure Runbook, Azure SQL Database, etc.  .

You could create a normal user in Azure Active Directory and use it.  If your AAD is synchronized with an on-premise one, it will get more complicated though.  You will need to create it on premise and...

Network Access Control on an HDInsight Cluster

In this post, I’m gona try to show how you can use an Azure Virtual Network with a Network Security Group to control the access (at the network level) to an HDInsight cluster.

For a primer on both those technologies, please refer to my Using Network Security Groups (NSG) to secure network access to an environment post.

The...

Analyzing Web Logs with Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA)

Azure Data Lake (both Storage & Analytics) has been in public preview for a month or two.

You can get started by reading this or have a look at Azure Data Lake series for more posts on Azure Data Lake.

I thought I would kick some posts about more complex scenarios to display...