Latest Articles
Azure CLI: Suppress Output for Silent Commands / Quiet Mode
The Azure CLI is really great for writing imperative scripts for automating Microsoft Azure resource management. Generally, the command output is helpful in telling you that updates were made or returning values that can be used for setting variables and then passing...
Azure Bicep Roadmap Q4’20 into 2021
Microsoft recently released the first preview of the Azure Bicep project which provides a new, more intuitive language for building out infrastructure as code deployments in Microsoft Azure. The v0.1 release includes support for a number of great features, including...
Getting Started with GitHub CLI
The all-new GitHub CLI has shipped! This now brings the power of GitHub to your terminal, on Windows, macOS, and Linux. GitHub is giving us the following capabilities: Run your entire GitHub workflow from the terminal, from issues through releasesCall the GitHub API...
Get Started with Azure DevOps Permissions On The CLI
Azure DevOps offers a rich set of fine-grained permissions. Unfortunately, the user interface only shows a few of them. When granting permissions through the user interface, it is hard to understand what permissions actually take effect, and how to limit the set to...
Migrate to Azure DevTest Labs
Earlier this year I wrote a few new articles for the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF). One of the docs I was excited about is about Azure DevTest Labs. In this article, we assume the role of the amazing fake company Contoso and look at migrating to using Azure as...
Featured Articles
Surface Duo First Impressions
The first-ever Microsoft Android phone arrived yesterday, and I have to say I'm impressed with the device. It's been about 72 hours since I received it so I thought I would give you my first impressions. Surface Duo Pros Great unboxing experience Microsoft did a...
Nvidia acquiring ARM for $40 Billion – Create AI Powerhouse
Nvidia has recently reported they will be acquiring ARM Holdings; the company behind ARM microprocessors. Nvidia is the top graphics processor company in the industry, and over the last 10+ years ARM processors (CPUs) have become the standard in all kinds of mobile...
Get Started with Azure Bicep – Alternative to ARM Templates
Azure Bicep is an abstraction built on top of Azure ARM Templates and Azure Resource Manager that offers a cleaner code syntax with better support for modularity and code re-use. Azure Bicep moves away from the JSON syntax used by ARM Templates and is much easier to...
Pentagon stays with Microsoft for $10 Billion JEDI Contract, Sorry Not Sorry Amazon
Today, the Pentagon stated that the US Department of Defense will be staying with their previous decision to award the $10 Billion JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) contract to Microsoft. Last October 2019, the Pentagon decided to award Microsoft the JEDI...
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Top 15 Security Certifications for your Job Role in 2021
Are you looking at security certifications? Certification in the areas of Cybersecurity, IT Security, and Computer Security do not have as many straight forward options in comparison to Windows or Linux certifications, or even cloud certifications with Microsoft...
CompTIA Linux+ XK0-004 Certification Exam
In the modern world of IT, Linux has been growing in popularity and use. This is especially something we are seeing in the cloud, where even Microsoft has admitted that there are more Linux server running in Microsoft Azure than Window servers. You could even...
Microsoft Azure IoT Developer (AZ-220) Certification is now LIVE
The Microsoft Certified: Azure IoT Developer Specialty certification (and exam AZ-220) is now LIVE and out of Beta. This is the first cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) certification from the major cloud providers and a great addition to the Microsoft Azure...
AZ-900 Exam: Azure IoT Product Overview from Tim Warner
For some time now, Tim Warner, a fellow Microsoft MVP, has been posting short videos that methodically go over all the AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals certification exam objectives and skill areas. This is a pretty great free series of training/study content geared towards...
Microsoft MCSA / MCSE Certifications Get Extended
In a response to the quarantine and lockdown restrictions due to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Microsoft has announced they are delaying retiring the MCSA, MCSE, and MCSD certifications and exams. These certifications are now going to be retired January 31,...
Azure CLI: Suppress Output for Silent Commands / Quiet Mode
The Azure CLI is really great for writing imperative scripts for automating Microsoft Azure resource management. Generally, the command output is helpful in telling you that updates were made or returning values that can be used for setting variables and then passing...
Azure Cloud Shell Tips and Tricks
The Azure Cloud Shell offers the ability to manage cloud resources, virtual machines, run scripts and other tasks directly from within the browser or Azure Mobile app. There are a few command-line tools for automating tasks and scripting things with Microsoft Azure....
Azure Web App: Application Settings
All web applications have some kind of configurations that are set on the server. The method of storing and accessing these settings varies on different web application platforms. In ASP.NET they are normally stored within <appSettings> element of the web.config...
Install Azure CLI on Windows with Winget
The Azure CLI is the command-line tool for working with Microsoft Azure resources, and grants you access to the CLI through both the Windows Command Prompt (CMD) or PowerShell command-line. You could download and install the Azure CLI using an MSI installer, but if...
Azure Bicep: Create IoT Hub and Device Provisioning Service (DPS)
All Azure IoT solutions are built starting with Azure IoT Hub as the cloud-base message broker for the Internet of Things (IoT) solution. This service connects all IoT devices in the solution securely to Azure using per-device security and two-way communication with...
Introduction to Azure Sphere – Secure IoT Development Platform
Azure Sphere is Microsoft's Internet of Things (IoT) platform for building more highly secured IoT solutions. Azure Sphere incorporates components of hardware, operating system, and cloud technologies to achieve greater security. It's design provides the ability to...
Terraform: Create Azure IoT Hub and Device Provisioning Service (DPS)
At the core of any Internet of Things (IoT) solution built with Microsoft Azure is the need to connect IoT devices to the cloud and send/retrieve event telemetry for those devices. When building an IoT solution using Azure IoT, the two primary services that you will...
Raspberry Pi 4 Available in 2, 4, and 8 GB Options
The Raspberry Pi is a popular single board computer with many different uses from Internet of Things (IoT) to learning about computer science and many other uses in between. Since the original release in 2012, the Raspberry Pi has had many updates over the years with...
Azure CLI: Suppress Output for Silent Commands / Quiet Mode
The Azure CLI is really great for writing imperative scripts for automating Microsoft Azure resource management. Generally, the command output is helpful in telling you that updates were made or returning values that can be used for setting variables and then passing...
Azure Bicep Roadmap Q4’20 into 2021
Microsoft recently released the first preview of the Azure Bicep project which provides a new, more intuitive language for building out infrastructure as code deployments in Microsoft Azure. The v0.1 release includes support for a number of great features, including...
Getting Started with GitHub CLI
The all-new GitHub CLI has shipped! This now brings the power of GitHub to your terminal, on Windows, macOS, and Linux. GitHub is giving us the following capabilities: Run your entire GitHub workflow from the terminal, from issues through releasesCall the GitHub API...
Get Started with Azure DevOps Permissions On The CLI
Azure DevOps offers a rich set of fine-grained permissions. Unfortunately, the user interface only shows a few of them. When granting permissions through the user interface, it is hard to understand what permissions actually take effect, and how to limit the set to...
Migrate to Azure DevTest Labs
Earlier this year I wrote a few new articles for the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF). One of the docs I was excited about is about Azure DevTest Labs. In this article, we assume the role of the amazing fake company Contoso and look at migrating to using Azure as...
Terraform Feature Flags & Environment Toggle Design Patterns
Terraform offers lots of flexibility in coding Infrastructure as Code (IaC) deployments. Using Feature Flags and Environment Toggles can help in increasing the flexibility of the Terraform code to better handle multi-Environment deployments. They can also be used to...
Policy-Based Routing on Unifi USG PRO 4
As an Azure MVP, I spent a lot of time teaching and giving webinars on the topic of moving to the cloud. A few months ago, I started to experience issues with my internet service provider (ISP), where I would lose connection, and this was very painful during large...
Azure Cosmos DB Free Tier Now Available
Microsoft has announced that a FREE pricing tier of Azure Cosmos DB (NoSQL, cloud-scale database engine) is now available. This new free tier is offering the ability to create a new Azure Cosmos DB Account with 400 RU/s and 5 GB storage for free for the lifetime of...
Free eBook: Developer’s Guide to Azure: 2020 Edition
The new "Developer's Guide to Azure" eBook published from Microsoft, written by Build5Nines' own Chris Pietschmann, is your guide to getting started with Microsoft Azure development. This book is a great jumpstart to your journey as an Azure Developer or Azure...
Azure Web App: Connection Strings
Just as all Azure Web Apps need configuration values, most applications also need to have database Connection String values configured. With Azure Web Apps the Connection Strings are stored/retrieved in a very similar fashion as Azure Web App Application Settings....
Azure Web App: Application Settings
All web applications have some kind of configurations that are set on the server. The method of storing and accessing these settings varies on different web application platforms. In ASP.NET they are normally stored within <appSettings> element of the web.config...
Sysinternals ProcDump for Linux
Sysinternals are very widely used tools from Microsoft in the Windows world, and now the ProcDump utility has been ported over to Linux as an Open Source project from Microsoft. ProcDump is a command-line (CLI) utility for monitoring an application for CPU spikes and...
Pentagon stays with Microsoft for $10 Billion JEDI Contract, Sorry Not Sorry Amazon
Today, the Pentagon stated that the US Department of Defense will be staying with their previous decision to award the $10 Billion JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) contract to Microsoft. Last October 2019, the Pentagon decided to award Microsoft the JEDI...
Easy to Use VPN with OpenVPN in Azure
Security and Privacy are key in todays digital first world. Setting up a VPN with OpenVPN in Microsoft Azure offers a fairly simple method to add an additional option to increase your security and privacy online. This is true for both personal and enterprise purposes....
Azure Regions Interactive Map
This Microsoft Azure Regions Interactive Map shows the locations of each of the Microsoft Azure cloud regions plotted on a map. The map code is built using the Azure Maps Web SDK Disclaimer: This is an unofficial map of Azure Regions and is not endorsed by or...
Sysinternals ProcDump for Linux
Sysinternals are very widely used tools from Microsoft in the Windows world, and now the ProcDump utility has been ported over to Linux as an Open Source project from Microsoft. ProcDump is a command-line (CLI) utility for monitoring an application for CPU spikes and...
Add New Root User to Ubuntu Linux Server using Bash
When installing Ubuntu, or any Linux distro, a root user will be created. However, there are many times when you need to create additional users with root or sudo privileges. Thankfully, Linux makes this fairly simple to do using the adduser and usermod commands for...
Surface Duo First Impressions
The first-ever Microsoft Android phone arrived yesterday, and I have to say I'm impressed with the device. It's been about 72 hours since I received it so I thought I would give you my first impressions. Surface Duo Pros Great unboxing experience Microsoft did a...
Nvidia acquiring ARM for $40 Billion – Create AI Powerhouse
Nvidia has recently reported they will be acquiring ARM Holdings; the company behind ARM microprocessors. Nvidia is the top graphics processor company in the industry, and over the last 10+ years ARM processors (CPUs) have become the standard in all kinds of mobile...
Surface Duo Hardware First Look
The first Android phone ever to be released by Microsoft is almost upon us and it is a bold design. Let's take a look at what it gives you in terms of the unique hardware Microsoft has brought to market with the Microsoft Surface Duo. Source: Microsoft Surface Duo...
Raspberry Pi 4 Available in 2, 4, and 8 GB Options
The Raspberry Pi is a popular single board computer with many different uses from Internet of Things (IoT) to learning about computer science and many other uses in between. Since the original release in 2012, the Raspberry Pi has had many updates over the years with...
Check Hyper-V (Intel VT-x) Virtualization Support on macOS Computer
Many Developers and other IT Professionals use macOS (via a Macbook Pro or other Apple computer) and do need to run Windows on their machine under virtualization using Parallels or VMWare. Doing this allows you to run both macOS and Windows, or even Linux, operating...
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The Ultimate Guide to Microsoft Certification
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This book will guide you through choosing which certification path(s) to follow you’re your unique career goals and technical background. It’ll also explore all the different certifications Microsoft offers, as well as many of your questions, like:
- Which certification is right for me?
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- What are the exams like?
- How do I get started?
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Microsoft and cloud certification helps you keep up-to-date on the latest technologies in a structured, easy to follow path, that is also verifiable by your peers and future career opportunities.
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Latest Cloud News: Nvidia acquires ARM, Azure Bicep IoT, Surface Duo and more! (September 15, 2020 – Build5Nines Weekly)
Build5Nines Weekly provides your go-to source to keep up-to-date on all the latest Microsoft Azure...
Latest Cloud News: Azure Bicep, VS CodeSpaces is Dead, JEDI and more! (September 8, 2020 – Build5Nines Weekly)
Build5Nines Weekly provides your go-to source to keep up-to-date on all the latest Microsoft Azure...
Latest Cloud News: Surface Duo, Windows PowerToys, Terraform Feature Flags and more! (September 1, 2020 – Build5Nines Weekly)
Build5Nines Weekly provides your go-to source to keep up-to-date on all the latest Microsoft Azure...
Latest Cloud News: Windows 95 is 25 yrs old, TikTok Sues US Govt, Apple vs Fortnite, and more! (August 25, 2020 – Build5Nines Weekly)
Build5Nines Weekly provides your go-to source to keep up-to-date on all the latest Microsoft Azure...
Latest Cloud News: Surface Duo, AKS, Azure CLI Kung Fu and more! (August 18, 2020 – Build5Nines Weekly)
Build5Nines Weekly provides your go-to source to keep up-to-date on all the latest Microsoft Azure...