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Joe Crabtree

Blogs from this Author

Azure VM – Announcing the GS Series

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the GS Series for Azure VM. A variant of G-series, the GS-series, which combines the compute power of G-series with the performance of Premium Storage to create powerful VMs for your most storage and compute intensive applications. Powered by the Intel Xeon E5 v3 family processors, the GS-series can have up […]

Azure Backup – Announcing Backup for Azure IaaS VM’s

Last week Microsoft announced general availability of Azure IaaS virtual machine backup, previewed earlier this year. Why use Azure Backup? Azure IaaS VM backup provides application consistent backup for Windows operating systems and file system consistency for Linux operating systems without the need to shut down virtual machines, making it enterprise ready solution. Azure Backup […]

Azure SQL – Row Level Security Now Available

Row-Level Security (RLS) for Azure SQL Database is now generally available. RLS simplifies the design and coding of security in your application. RLS enables you to implement restrictions on data row access. For example ensuring that workers can access only those data rows that are pertinent to their department, or restricting a customer’s data access […]

Azure: Did You Know? Virtual Machine Config Management – DevOps

By now you’ve heard the term DevOps. (If not, Wikipedia’s definition works.) So what tools are available to me in the Microsoft Azure environment to support DevOps? Azure Virtual Machines have a variety of built-in extensions that can enable configuration management. There are two extensions for Windows Powershell. The custom script extension allows you to […]

Microsoft Azure Named Leader in Public Cloud Storage Services

Exciting news as Gartner research recently published their Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Storage Services and recognized Microsoft Azure as a leader for the second year in a row based on completeness of their vision and ability to execute. The amount of digital data produced each year is growing exponentially. According to IDC, by 2020 total […]

Azure: Did You Know? Upgrade Domains and Fault Domains

Have you ever wondered how Microsoft provides an SLA of 99.95% for Azure? 99.95% is quite high, it means that the Azure service is available the entire year with only 4 hrs and 23 minutes of downtime. How does Microsoft guarantee this level of service? Fault Domains A fault domain is a physical point of […]

Introduction to Azure Search

Pull out your cell phone, go to any app, and chances are that app has a search box. The same is true of most websites. Our ability to find information in a cloud-first, mobile-first world is driven by search capabilities. Azure Search is a search-as-a-service solution that allows developers to incorporate great search experiences in applications without […]

Everything You Need To Know About Microsoft Azure Stack

Before we discuss Azure Stack, it’s important to understand Windows Azure Pack. I know I know, very confusing names, Pack and Stack. Windows Azure Pack was released in early fall 2013. Here’s a brief synopsis: Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server is a collection of Windows Azure technologies, available to Microsoft customers at no additional […]

Azure: Did You Know? Bulk Import/Export

When moving to Microsoft Azure, you may need migrate large amounts of data to the cloud. Traditional upload methods require moving that data across the public internet, which can be limited by a number of factors. The Azure Import and Export service for storage allows you to ship data into or out of an Azure Storage account […]

Ignite 2015 Recap – Top 3 Sessions to Replay

Welcome back from a great Ignite Conference! By now, I hope everyone knows that the conference recordings are posted to channel9, a section of MSDN. Microsoft does a great job of recording and publishing all of this content quickly, its pretty awesome. One of my biggest challenges at the conference was knowing which session to […]

Ignite 2015 – Introducing Azure Service Fabric

Service Fabric is a state-of-the-art distributed system that allows developers to easily build and manage Internet scale services. Translation = this is the underlying system that powers Azure services such as: Azure SQL, Bing Cortana, Intune, Skype for Business, Event Hubs, PowerBI, and many other core infrastructure in Azure. And Microsoft just released it to the public. […]

Ignite 2015 – DevOps Strategy, Visual Studio Online Announcements

For my first session at Microsoft Ignite Conference 2015, I chose DevOps as a Strategy for Business Agility by Brian Harry, Microsoft Technical Fellow and he serves as the Product Unit Manager for Microsoft Team Foundation Server. I must say, it was a great choice. Brian kicked off this amazing session with only a few, very […]

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