PulsarIO

How to Customize Your AWS Landing Zone with Control Tower

In my previous blog post, I showed you how to get started with AWS Control Tower, a service that helps you set up and govern a secure, compliant, and well-architected multi-account AWS environment. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend you to check it out here. In this

AWS Featured

Landing Your AWS Journey With Control Tower

You can think of AWS Control Tower as an orchestra director that leverages various AWS services to create a foundation for your multi-account architecture.

A New Journey

It has been a while since my last post, as I have been busy settling into my new role at Amazon Web Services as a Technical Account Manager. Joining AWS has definitely been a journey for me, and I am humbled and excited to join AWS at such a great

Azure DevOps Featured

Best Practices For Setting Up Azure DevOps Projects With Git

As I have been delving into Azure DevOps for a while now, I have discovered some best practices utilizing Azure DevOps Projects that I thought might be useful to share.

Azure Featured

Deploying A SQL Server Database Onto An On Prem Server Using Azure DevOps

In this post I will show you how to deploy a SQL Database Project into a Windows 2016 on-prem sever running an instance of SQL Server 2017 by leveraging Azure DevOps.

Azure DevOps Featured

Deploying ASP.NET Classic Framework Apps Using Azure DevOps Release Manager

Hence, in today's post I will show how to deploy a site to an on-prem Windows 2016 server running IIS from a cloud hosted instance of Azure DevOps.

Azure DevOps Featured

Build ASP.NET Framework Apps With Azure Pipelines

Thus, I thought it would be useful to share from the bits that I have found so far in working with Azure Pipelines YAML based build configurations.

Azure Featured

Learning Resources for Developing on Containers in Azure

It has been a while since I last posted, as I have been busy learning more about containers while leading and managing a development team. However, I would like to share some informational resources regarding containerized applications and migration routes in Azure that leverage a Microservices architectural style. These resources

DevOps Featured

Enabling DevOps with Azure ARM

Lately I have been working more closely with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) on a DevOps project and wanted to share a few quick tips on working with ARM templates. If you have not used ARM yet, then head over to this [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/resource-group-overview] page

ASP.NET Core

Deploying ASP.NET Core And EF Core To Docker On Azure Using Visual Studio 2017

In a previous [https://jpvelasco.com/unit-testing-asp-net-core-with-entity-framework-core/] blog post I showed you how you can setup unit tests to run in memory when testing ASP.NET Core & EF Core applications. But what about when you want to deploy a new application built on .NET Core. In this post I outline

Git

Tips for Using Visual Studio Team Services in Your Projects

Coordinating development efforts and source code across individuals and teams is usually filled with its own set of challenges. Thankfully, if you are working on a side project of any kind, Microsoft has a very generous and free offer for you: Visual Studio Team Services [https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/

ASP.NET Core Featured

Testing ASP.NET Core With Entity Framework In-Memory Providers

With the final release of ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core there were a number of new and welcome improvements that came along with those releases. One of them being the ability to run Entity Framework without having to bootstrap a physical database. That is, Entity Framework Core can

CISSP Featured

Maintaining CISSP Certification Through Continuous Learning

As a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) there is a requirement that I earn 120 "Continuing Professional Education" (CPE) credits in a 3 year span in order to maintain the CISSP certification. This equates to earning 40 CPE credits per year to complete that goal. Thus, regardless of anyone's

Azure AD Featured

The Business Case For IDaaS

I remember when Azure Active Directory was first coming out a few years back, if you can recall the days of Access Control Service (ACS) [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/gg185920.aspx], you would agree that things are drastically different in today's Azure AD. Yet, with the rapid

Azure Featured

Test Driving The Azure Key Vault Client Samples

In my previous post [https://jpvelasco.com/keeping-secrets-safe-with-azure-key-vault/] I wrote a brief introduction on how to get started with Azure Key Vault [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/key-vault/]. As an exercise for myself, I wanted to dive in a bit more detail about what is involved in setting up

Azure Key Vault Featured

Keeping Secrets Safe With Azure Key Vault

Introduction Keeping secrets is hard! And if those secrets are of sensitive nature, like those of a database application connection string for instance, then even more so! Interestingly enough, lately as I was diving into Azure Key Vault [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/key-vault/] to gain a greater personal

Azure AD Featured

Authenticating With Azure AD Graph API Using A Client Certificate

Lately I have been looking at authenticating to Azure AD without having to rely an a 'shared' secret. That is, for the most part, how the code samples [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-code-samples] about Azure AD are crafted, there is usually a step to generate an application

Security Featured

2016, The Year Of The Security Data Breach

As I look back at 2016, I realize just how hard this year has been for (in)security in organizations throughout the world. In early 2016, Wired magazine had a few predictions on what kind of security threats we would face during the year: https://www.wired.com/2016/01/

Security Featured

Staying Secure In The Cloud

Lately, I have been thinking more about how to build secure cloud applications and the implications of such an endeavor. Interestingly enough, as I sat down to write this post I stumbled upon some news today about how an Azure customer had saved Microsoft from a security disaster, you can

.NET Core Featured

Visual Studio For Mac (Preview), First Impressions

I remember when I was first getting started with the .NET Framework back in 2003. I had delved a bit in PHP, Java, and then I started a project in C++...that is, managed C++ running on .NET for which I had to download and install Visual Studio 2003. Shortly

Microsoft Graph Featured

Taking The Updated Microsoft Graph, Out For A Test Drive

There have been a number of improvements made to the Microsoft Graph Explorer [https://graph.microsoft.io/en-us/graph-explorer] during the last release that are very much note worthy. A couple of members from The Office Extensibility team, Toby Baratta & Elizabeth Dinella, created a very nice blog post about their

Microsoft Graph Featured

Testing Out A Multi Tenant Sample With The Microsoft Graph

I have been looking at different ways to integrate the Microsoft Graph into an application, so when I got started I needed a quick way to accomplish this so I can be productive from the start. So I took one of the Azure AD applications Sample [https://github.com/Azure-Samples/

Ghost(Pro)

Migrating to Ghost(Pro)...

So I finally decided to move my entire blog to be hosted on Ghost(Pro) [https://ghost.org/]. This will be an ideal move as it will free me from having to manage backups and uptime for my blog which is currently hosted in Azure. I definitely think that hosting

Microsoft Graph Featured

The Microsoft Graph, My New Adventure Begins...

I have been catching up on some of the talks from the 2016 Microsoft Ignite conference, and amongst all of the great talks there was one that caught my eye, it is the one about the Microsoft Graph and how it can power up today's applications Access the Microsoft Graph

ASP.NET Core Featured

Multitenancy & ASP.NET Core, A New Frontier

Lately I have been looking a bit closer at the existing options for designing and building multitenant applications in ASP.NET Core and I just wanted to share a some of my thoughts on this. If you have some experience building multitenant applications you would agree that this is no