Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is a comprehensive cloud-based platform used around the world. It is an identity provider and access management service. If a company employs OneDrive, Skype, or Outlook, they are already using Azure in some capacity. Similarly, if a company uses Microsoft Teams or other applications in the Microsoft Office Suite, they are accessing them by logging into Azure AD.

Self-hosted runners allow you to host your own scalable execution environments in your private cloud or on-premises, giving you more flexibility to customize and control your CI/CD infrastructure. Teams with unique security or compute requirements can set up and start using self-hosted runners in under five minutes.

When implementing your content strategy, you'll need to be intentional about the technology you choose to manage the digital assets you create, share, and store. From creation and storage to accessibility and sharing of your digital assets, using cloud storage for content operations has a few rules you need to follow.

When you build modern cloud-based systems, you usually realize quickly that you need to manage the access to your deployed resources. This is especially true with serverless systems, where you often end up with dozens of resources, even for medium-sized architectures. AWS offers a few services you can use to set up a central entry point to your infrastructure. Elastic Load Balancer, API Gateway, and AWS AppSync. This article will discuss AppSync, AWS’s managed GraphQL service.

Modern enterprises understand the need to move away from developing monolithic applications to ones that make best use of the cloud to enable business acceleration at scale and speed. That means transforming development to more resilient cloud native architectures that can be readily deployed to cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments. What does it mean to be cloud native?

Recently, we hosted a great joint webinar with the team from AVD TechFest to present the results of a survey we conducted jointly to assess real-world Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) usage and industry and customer sentiments towards the AVD technologies. Alongside myself, Peter Claridge from eG Innovations and Simon Binder, digital workplace architect at Cygate and co-founder of the community-oriented AVD TechFest, were answering Azure Virtual Desktop questions.

With the release of Splunk 9.0 came support for SmartStore in Azure. Previously to achieve this, you’d have to use some form of S3-compliant broker API, but now we can use native Azure APIs. The addition of this capability means that Splunk now offers complete SmartStore support for all three of the big public cloud vendors. This blog will describe a little bit about how it works, and help you set it up yourself.

The most important thing with building out any application is to think BIG. Build for ten users now and 10,000 users tomorrow. Having infrastructure that scales as your needs do is critical for user adoption—one of the many reasons we love a serverless approach and particularly AWS Lambda. The other part of any growth journey is managing access to organizational cloud infrastructure, especially with rapidly growing organizational development and DevOps teams.

Microsoft has no shortage of online services, computer products, and digital platforms. The sheer amount of different offerings from the tech giant is enough to make anyone's head spin. When it comes to cloud services, the two Microsoft products that immediately come to mind are OneDrive and SharePoint. But what are the differences between SharePoint and OneDrive, and do you need both? Or can you get by with one? What cloud storage service should you invest in?