In this blog post, I take the new AWS FSx Storage Gateway for a test spin together with a set of Active Directory DNS Geo-Location policies for a seamless namespace for clients that attach to the gateway. Meaning I only want to tell my clients to attach to a single name (i.e. fsx1.spikebiz.com) no matter … Read more
AWS IoT Environment Startup/Shutdown One of the easiest ways to save money on your AWS EC2 costs especially for development environments is to only run them when there is active development and then shut them down when they are not in use. There are a number of great articles on how to do automatic scheduling … Read more
In my latest Hands On series, I take a look at Parallels RAS version 17.1 deployed on AWS infrastructure. I have been following this product since the acquision of 2X (which you will still find references to scattered in some of the executables) by Parallels. For a good portion of my career, I focused on … Read more
In my previous post (Hands On: N2WS Backup & Recovery) I took a look a some features of V3.1 of N2WS Backup & Recovery. I did show some of the nice features of the product, but I failed to really highlight the most important feature of the product: Recovery! Anyone can backup, but the real … Read more
In this hands on series I take a spin with V3.1 of N2WS Backup & Recovery. You might ask, “Why do I need protection in the cloud, the cloud is already protected, right?”. One of my favorite quotes of all time: Everything fails, all the time – Dr. Werner Vogels As I architect cloud solutions, … Read more
I was recently given a problem set that involved the long term storage of Microsoft SQL backup files on AWS that should be stored using a “Write Once Read Many” (WORM) type of scenario. Backup Requirements: The backup storage requirements were given as these: Backups should be retained and immutable for a total of 5 … Read more
A very common cloud workload is a Microsoft Windows File Server. The fantastic thing about the cloud is there is no shortage of options to fulfill this requirement, but which solution to choose? In this post, I’ll take a look at three different options and look at the price and performance of each as it … Read more
AWS just announced support for UDP in their Network Load Balancer.https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-udp-load-balancing-for-network-load-balancer/ We can take advantage of this right away to make our Microsoft NPS servers with the Azure MFA extension (MFA in the cloud) highly available within our AWS environment. If you are already invested in Office 365, it makes sense to take advantage of … Read more
In this blog post, I will show you how to create a highly-available and disaster indifferent remote access architecture using Microsoft DirectAccess on AWS. Everything fails all the time – Dr. Werner Vogel While we can’t control when things will fail, we certainly can develop architectures that are resilient enough to handle those failures. Stephen … Read more
At some point (pre-2012), I signed up for G-Suite that had a limited but free set of services. I’ve continued to use those services, but wondered if I could federate this into my AWS environment. Seemed simple enough. You will need admin permissions both in your AWS account as well as G-Suite. G-Suite Steps Log … Read more