David O´Brien

An Amazon Web Services (AWS) Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a virtual network dedicated to your AWS account. In this post, I will explain how to create an AWS VPC with PowerShell.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is pretty much at the heart of all systems. If DNS does not work, things almost always stop working. This of course also applies to the cloud and systems deployed to it. If you would like to learn more about the basics of DNS, read up on it on one of the largest public DNS provider’s websites. People reference a DNS zone as “private DNS” if this zone is not accessible from the internet.

Have you read the previous article on [deploying Azure Active Directory Domain Services (AADDS and now want to know how to join an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) to that domain, or do you already have AADDS deployed and now need to join that domain?

Hands up if you like deploying Active Directory Domain Services. Hands up if you enjoy managing domain controllers and flexible single master operation (FSMO) roles and site replication. Hands up if you believe this work directly positively impacts your business’s revenue. Hands up if you’d love for there to be a managed service that gives you Active Directory without the pains of managing it.

Many of my customers want to get alerts whenever a specific user logs into Azure, like their break-glass administrator account—the account you use when everything else fails. The account does not have multi-factor authentication enabled, and there’s no simple way to get these events and logs out of Azure Active Directory (Azure AD or AAD) and then into an Azure Monitor Log Analytics workspace to trigger an alert. Fortunately, now there is, and it is easy to configure.

If you have followed the previous articles on how to create an Azure virtual network and on how to deploy an Azure jumpbox, you will be perfectly set up for this article. In this article, we will deploy and configure the required infrastructure to set up a point-to-site (P2S) VPN from our laptop or workstation to our Azure network.

Have you seen my previous article on the Azure virtual network (VNet) architecture? No? Then go and check it out. You already have an existing Azure network? Great! This article will explain the need for an Azure jumpbox (sometimes also called jump server) and how to deploy and configure it.

So, you’re wondering about Azure Virtual Networks (vnets) and how to create them properly? Well, there are a lot of ways to set them up, but in principle they all do the same things. Let’s break it down.