When I talk to customers and colleagues about cloud offerings, most of them are still concerned about the cloud, and especially about the security of public cloud offerings. One of the most mentioned concerns is based on the belief, that each and every cloud-based VM is publicly reachable over the internet. This can be so, but it does not have to. It relies on your design. Maybe that is only a problem in germany.
Okay, the headline of this blog post is a bit provocative. This blog post is not written from the vendor perspective. It’s the perspective of someone, who’s sitting between the vendor and the customer. A value-added reseller (VAR) is typically located between vendor and customer. And the business model of a VAR is typically based on selling hardware, software and service.
Added value The typical customer doesn’t have the time, money and the know-how to transform business requirements into a bill of materials (BOM).
Automation is essential to reduce friction and to streamline operational processes. It’s indispensable when it comes to the automation of manual, error-prone and frequently repeated tasks in a cloud or enterprise environment. Automation is the key to IT industrialization. Azure Automation is used to automate operational processes withing Microsoft Azure.
Automation account The very first thing you have to create is an Automation account. You can have multiple Automation accounts per subscription.
Before you can manage Azure services with Azure Automation, you need to authenticate the Automation account against a subscription. This authentication process is part of each runbook. There are two different ways to authenticate against an Azure subscription:
Active Directory user Certificate If you want to use an Active Directory account, you have to create a credential asset in the Automation account and provide username and password for that Active Directory account.
Building networks in the cloud is sometimes hard to understand. A common mistake is to believe that all VMs can talk to another, regardless of the owner, and that all VMs are available over the internet.
Some basics about Cloud Service Endpoints and Virtual Networks When we talk about Microsoft Azure, a Cloud Service Endpoint is the easiest way to access one or multiple VMs. A Cloud Service contains resources, like VMs, and it’s acting as a communication and security boundary.
VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) stands in one line with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace Cloud or other cloud offerings. I don’t want to compare the different provider with vCHS. To be honest: This article is more a summary for myself, than really new content. I just want to summarize information about the IaaS offering of VMware. If you want a comparison of vCHS and AWS, I recommend to read this article written by Alex Mattson (AHEAD).
