TL;DR - In the last few days (start of 2021), the “Shields Up” feature in the Brave web browser seems to be flagging a JSON file as a cross-site tracker when creating a resource in Azure, causing the blade to not load. To work around this, you can go “shields down” for portal.azure.com. I logged on to my machine yesterday, same as any other day, and went to start deploying some resources to Azure via the Azure Portal for a customer, nothing out of the ordinary.

I’m really happy to anounce that another course I’ve created for Pluralsight has gone live in their library today. This one has a wordy title, being Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect: Implement a Workload Management Strategy, and this is a part of the Azure AZ 303 Solutions Architect focused exam path. This year Pluralsight have been putting a very specific focus on creating Microsoft Azure content spificially targetted at helping learners learn exam objectives and pass the exam to achieve a certification, rather than going deep in to skill building of all of the solutions that are covered in an exam.

New Pluralsight Course: Formatting Data in PowerShell I’m a bit late to the party with this post, as this course went live around the 27th of October, 2020, but I’m happy to say I’ve had my second course at Pluralsight recently go live! This course is another PowerShell based course in the PowerShell 7 fundamentals track at Pluralsight, titled Formatting Data in PowerShell. This course is aimed to help you understand the PowerShell formatting system and why results are formatted the way they are by default, and then how to override that formatting to get the data in the format you need it in.

First things first, if you prefer to consume video content, the same content that is in this blog post is in the video below. If you prefer to read, please skip past the video and read on! Secrets Management Microsoft have recently released an update to a PowerShell module they’ve been working on for a short while now which is everything to do with management of secrets. Version 3 of the Secret Management PowerShell module was released last week and it is a decent update from version 2, so much so that it includes breaking changes, as can be expected with preview releases.

This is a short post and I’ll cut straight to it. I’m really happy to announce that I’ve published my first course with Pluralsight, Extending PowerShell. The course is aimed at helping you learn and understand PowerShell Modules and is part of a larger learning path for PowerShell 7 that is being produced currently on PowerShell. I have worked hard to make this demo heavy in a way that you can follow along with each task, and I hope you do, as the hands-on is where the knowledge gets solidified.

Introduction I’ve recently been working on building a video course titled “Azure Functions for DevOps Engineers”, and I’m really happy to announce that the course is now live on the CloudSkills.io platform. For the next week or so, the course is available for $7 USD (yep, seven), and I know I’m biased, but I think that’s a great deal! If you head on over to check it out, I’d also recommend browsing through the other content available at CloudSkills, there’s been so much success from students of the courses and there’s also some awesome upcoming workshops planned that you can enroll for.

The VMware VMUG UserCon has been my favourite local (Australian) event since attending my first one in 2017. It is one of the standout events for community sessions and networking and one I personally look forward to every year. The teams involved with VMUG and especially the local VMUG members in Sydney and Melbourne do a fantastic job every year of bringing everyone together and handling the logistics. Things will of course be different this year with the event going virtual, but I’m still looking forward to it on Thursday the 30th of July, 2020.

Introduction Microsoft recently released a PowerShell module named Az.Functions, providing cmdlets to manage the Azure Functions Service. According to the PowerShell Gallery, version 1.0.0 was released on the 19th of May, followed by 1.0.1 on the 23rd of June (2 days ago). Az.Functions is now included as part of the wider Az module, so if you install the entire Az PowerShell module, you’ll automatically receive Az.Functions. In this post, we’ll take a 101 look at some of the cmdlets that are included in this initial release.

This might not be a new one to a lot of folk, but it certainly was to me! This week I was proactively updating some NIC driver and firmware for a customer to avoid a known issue where the FCoE driver could cause an ESXi Purple Screen of Death (PSOD). Both firmware and drivers needed to be upgraded to maintain interoperability. While I am very much looking forward to vSphere Lifecycle Manager (finally!

Introduction Towards the end of 2019, I made a decision to aim for a certification in one of the primary public clouds. The decision on which cloud to focus on was relatively simple for me for a couple of reasons: Microsoft certianly seem to be doing awesome things with Azure and it feels like there is a lot of hype around Azure in the circles I travel in, at least more so than GCP or AWS I work for a partner and while not specifically in the team that are delivering public cloud solutions and managed services, we are currently 100% focused on Azure and are a Microsoft triple gold partner.