Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

As you all know by now, it really is time to say goodbye to TLS 1.0/1.1. You might be ready to only offer and support TLS 1.2. Perhaps you can even add TLS 1.3 as well. Being able and willing to block TLS 1.0/1.1 is a good thing completely. Well done.

In this blog post, we will talk about getting your Django project deployed to Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. There are different ways you can do that with AWS: one is deployment to EC2 instance running Linux (you just connect to it over SSH and work with Linux server directly), and the other one is deployment to Elastic Beanstalk. The first scenario is close to simple project setup on a local Linux machine with some extra steps involved – for that you can refer to my previous posts which cover most of the steps involved. In this post, we will focus on Elastic Beanstalk deployment scenario, going through all the steps involved in this process when it is performed from Ubuntu.

We all know that connecting production VMs directly to the Internet via a public IP is a huge concern from a cybersecurity standpoint. Therefore, usually, all critical VMs don’t have public IPs, and they are managed either from a site-to-site VPN or a console VM that holds a public IP. In both cases, managing your Azure VMs is not easy since cybersecurity is a concern.

iSCSI and Fiber Channel have proven themselves as reliable partners of mission-critical operations over the last two decades, true. However, despite iSCSI’s praise, it can’t properly talk to flash, thereby hindering you from achieving the performance SSDs truly promise. Fortunately, we’ve been working really hard to resolve that mishap, and we’ve finally nailed it!

If the previous part, you read about general boundaries of cybersecurity and why it’s mandatory to uphold. Continuing the topic, the initial steps to ensuring your business is cyber-secure, you need to create a solid foundation. Baseline OS security tools have to be configured and active 24/7, and much success of cybersecurity depends on educating your staff.

Cohesiveness is something hyperconvergence vendors have been really going for this year. Recently, VMware has introduced its vRealize Operations Managers 8.0, an update of its “friendly admin” type of product. The new version has additions to workload planning, cost comparison, HCI nodes removal, scalability, on-prem/cloud health monitoring, and more.

Veeam enables to restore a VM to Azure from the latest recovery point. The main goal of this feature is disaster recovery. In case of failure, you can restart VMs in Azure. This feature can also be used to migrate the workload from On-Prem to Microsoft Azure. You can also restore a VM in Amazon EC2. In this topic, we’ll see how to restore a VM from Veeam to Microsoft Azure.

Security issues, unfortunately, remain a priority even today, because, obviously, there is no such thing as too much protection. In the case of the custom domains on your apps, the same rules apply. Luckily, there is a new security feature for Azure App Service released. App Service Managed Certificates will help you to secure your domains on Windows and Linux apps!

During Microsoft Ignite 2019, Microsoft, using the Public Preview mode, released the capability to protect your Azure Web App (your website) with a public trusted certificate.