Azure Advocates Weekly Roundup – New Learn Modules!

by Scott Muniz | Aug 14, 2020 | Azure, Microsoft, Technology, Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

New Learn Modules for Azure and Window Server IT Pros is just the beginning to this weeks content wrap up from the Advocate team!

Content Round Up

Mod 11:Deploy Azure File Sync (Video)
Orin Thomas

Mod 20:Manage Azure VM Backups (Video)
Orin Thomas

New Microsoft Learn Modules for Azure and Windows Server IT Pros
Thomas Maurer

Migrate VMs from AWS to Azure with Azure Migrate
Sarah Lean

How to use Terraform to Create Azure DevOps Projects
Anthony Bartolo

Blog/ Setting-up Codespaces for .NET Core App Development
Justin Yoo

This post shows how to set up a common development environment for Visual Studio Codespaces to build .NET Core applications.

Video: Migrate your AWS VMs to Azure with Azure Migrate
Sarah Lean

Connect Azure Cloud Shell to Virtual Network vNet
Thomas Maurer

GraphQL on Azure: Part 3 – Azure Functions
Aaron Powell

Blog/ Turning Raspberry PI into Remote Controller
Justin Yoo

This post shows how to enable LIRC module on a Raspberry PI so that it turns into a remote controller for all home appliances.

Jay Gordon

Web API Authentication with Microsoft.Identity.Web
Matt Soucoup

Azure Architecture Best Practices Virtual Event
Thomas Maurer

Use Debezium pgoutput plugin with Azure PostgreSQL
Abhishek Gupta

“Get Inspired By These BitCamp Final Projects by High School Students!” Dev.to post
Chloe Condon

Twitch stream: adding accessibility tooling and linting to a React-based game
Em Lazer-Walker

Azure Functions with WSL2 and Visual Studio Code
Alvaro Videla Godoy

Lab: How to restore a deleted database on Azure SQL DW

by Scott Muniz | Aug 14, 2020 | Azure, Microsoft, Technology, Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

I made this as a quick lab based on the public documentation to help address this doubt about restoring a deleted database on Azure.

This is a common customer doubt.

• Create a new DW database and change the performance level to the minimum, this is just a lab as you can check on fig. 1.
   

  

Fig 1 Create database

• Connect on SQL Server Management Studio and check the last backup by running the following:

select * from sys.pdw_loader_backup_runs

Fig. 2 No backups

It is completely empty as there is no backup for this database, yet. So, let’s force a backup to be done by creating a restore point.

• Define a new restore point on the Azure Portal by clicking on… New Restore Point Fig 3.

Fig 3 Restore Point

• Connect on SQL Server Management Studio again and check the lastest backups by running again pdw_loader_backup_run as you can confirm on fig 4:

Fig 4 One backup

By the docs: 

A data warehouse restore is a new data warehouse that is created from a restore point of an existing or deleted data warehouse. Restoring your data warehouse is an essential part of any business continuity and disaster recovery strategy because it re-creates your data after accidental corruption or deletion.

Doc: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/backup-and-restore

SQL DW will create 42 restore points and the user can additionally create more 42 restore points. Basically this is a restore to a point in time.

• Let’s add one more restore point.
• Create a table like the script below and then add a new restore point. You should get the results as shown in Fig 5.

create table test1 ( i int)

Fig 5 New restore point.

• Drop the database from  Azure Portal as fig 6.

Fig 6 Drop the database

• Restore  the database:

Public doc: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-restore-deleted-dw

1. Open PowerShell.
2. Connect to your Azure account and list all the subscriptions associated with your account.
3. Select the subscription that contains the deleted SQL pool to be restored.
4. Get the specific deleted data warehouse.

Add the details and run on power shell:

$SubscriptionName="<YourSubscriptionName>"
$ResourceGroupName="<YourResourceGroupName>"
$ServerName="<YourServerNameWithoutURLSuffixSeeNote>"  # Without database.windows.net
#$TargetResourceGroupName="<YourTargetResourceGroupName>" # uncomment to restore to a different server.
#$TargetServerName="<YourtargetServerNameWithoutURLSuffixSeeNote>"
$DatabaseName="<YourDatabaseName>"
$NewDatabaseName="<YourDatabaseName>"

Connect-AzAccount
Get-AzSubscription
Select-AzSubscription -SubscriptionName $SubscriptionName

# Get the deleted database to restore
$DeletedDatabase = Get-AzSqlDeletedDatabaseBackup -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName -ServerName $ServerName -DatabaseName $DatabaseName

# Restore deleted database
$RestoredDatabase = Restore-AzSqlDatabase –FromDeletedDatabaseBackup –DeletionDate $DeletedDatabase.DeletionDate -ResourceGroupName $DeletedDatabase.ResourceGroupName -ServerName $DeletedDatabase.ServerName -TargetDatabaseName $NewDatabaseName –ResourceId $DeletedDatabase.ResourceID

# Use the following command to restore deleted data warehouse to a different server
#$RestoredDatabase = Restore-AzSqlDatabase –FromDeletedDatabaseBackup –DeletionDate $DeletedDatabase.DeletionDate -ResourceGroupName $TargetResourceGroupName -ServerName $TargetServerName -TargetDatabaseName $NewDatabaseName –ResourceId $DeletedDatabase.ResourceID

# Verify the status of restored database
$RestoredDatabase.status

Simple like that! You can also use the portal for it, look at the public documentation for more details.

• If you run again sys.pdw_loader_backup_runs after the restore you will see the restore points as the user drop database and the latest backups:

Fig 7 Restore points

Note: A dropped DW database is cleaned-up  8 days after the drop and cannot be restored

That is it!

Liliam 

UK Engineer.

Friday Five: Xamarin Forms Snippets, Azure NAT Gateway, More!

by Scott Muniz | Aug 14, 2020 | Azure, Microsoft, Technology, Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

CSS live reloading on Blazor

Jun-ichi Sakamoto is a Japanese MVP for Developer Technologies. The 10-time MVP title holder specializes in C#, ASP.NET, Blazor, Azure Web Apps, TypeScript. Jun-ichi’s publication of NuGet packages – like Entity Framework Core, helper, testing tools, Blazor components, and more – have been downloaded more than 18 million times. For more on Jun-ichi, check out his Twitter @jsakamoto

Helping the busy BDM or manager: create ToDo tasks automatically when you are mentioned in a team channel

Vesku Nopanen is a Principal Consultant in Office 365 and Modern Work and passionate about Microsoft Teams. He helps and coaches customers to find benefits and value when adopting new tools, methods, ways or working and practices into daily work-life equation. He focuses especially on Microsoft Teams and how it can change organizations’ work. He lives in Turku, Finland. Follow him on Twitter: @Vesanopanen

6 useful Xamarin Forms Snippets

Damien Doumer is a software developer and Microsoft MVP in development technologies, who from Cameroon and currently based in France. He plays most often with ASP.Net Core and Xamarin, and builds mobile apps and back-ends. He often blogs, and he likes sharing content on his blog at https://doumer.me. Though he’s had to deal with other programming languages and several frameworks, he prefers developing in C# with the .Net framework. Damien’s credo is “Learn, Build, Share and Innovate”. Follow him on Twitter @Damien_Doumer.

#Microsoft Windows Admin Center and Azure Backup Management #WAC #Azure

James van den Berg has been working in ICT with Microsoft Technology since 1987. He works for the largest educational institution in the Netherlands as an ICT Specialist, managing datacenters for students. He’s proud to have been a Cloud and Datacenter Management since 2011, and a Microsoft Azure Advisor for the community since February this year. In July 2013, James started his own ICT consultancy firm called HybridCloud4You, which is all about transforming datacenters with Microsoft Hybrid Cloud, Azure, AzureStack, Containers, and Analytics like Microsoft OMS Hybrid IT Management. Follow him on Twitter @JamesvandenBerg and on his blog here.

Step by Step Azure NAT Gateway – Static Outbound Public IP address

Robert Smit is a EMEA Cloud Solution Architect at Insight.de and is a current Microsoft MVP Cloud and Datacenter as of 2009. Robert has over 20 years experience in IT with experience in the educational, health-care and finance industries. Robert’s past IT experience in the trenches of IT gives him the knowledge and insight that allows him to communicate effectively with IT professionals. Follow him on Twitter at @clusterMVP

Using Azure PIM for the AIP Super User feature management

by Scott Muniz | Aug 14, 2020 | Azure, Microsoft, Technology, Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

The Super User feature of the Azure Rights Management service from Azure Information Protection ensures that authorized people and services can always read and inspect the data that Azure Rights Management protects for your organization. You can learn more about the super user feature and how to enable and manage it here.

One of the concerns we have heard from our customers regarding the super user management was that to be able to add a super user, one needs to be assigned the Global Administrator role and that the super user assignment is permanent until manually removed. All this adds complexity to the roles management workflow and raises security, compliance and governance questions especially at large companies with distributed IT organizations.

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Privileged Identity Management (PIM) is a service that enables you to manage, control, and monitor access to important resources in your organization. These resources include resources in Azure AD, Azure, and other Microsoft Online Services like Office 365 or Microsoft Intune. You can learn more about Azure PIM here.

One of the most expected PIM features had been ability to manage membership of privileged AAD groups. Finally, you can now assign eligibility for membership or ownership of privileged access groups. You can learn more about this new capability here.

Note: As of this writing (August 2020) this feature is in preview, so it is subject to change.

So, how can this new feature help us with the problem outlined above? Let’s find out.

Enable the AIP Super User feature

If you have not enabled the Super User feature yet, you need to connect to the AIP service as a Global Administrator and run the following command: Enable-AipServiceSuperUserFeature

Figure 1: Enabling the AIP Super User feature

Note: Please take a moment to review our security best practices for the Super User feature.

Create an Azure AD group

Before you go ahead and create a new group, you need to consider:

• AIP only works with identities which have an email address (proxyAddress attribute in Azure AD)
• As of this writing (August 2020) only new Microsoft 365 and Security groups can be created with “isAssignableToRole” property, you can’t set or change it for existing groups.
• This new switch is only visible to Privileged Role Administrators and Global Administrators because these are only two roles that can set the switch.

This leaves us with the only option – a new Microsoft 365 group.

Figure 2: Creating a new Microsoft 365 group in the Azure Portal

If you prefer PowerShell, you can use it too:

Figure 3: Creating a new Microsoft 365 group using PowerShell

Figure 4: Reviewing properties of the new Microsoft 365 group using PowerShell

Enable PIM support for the new group

Our next step is to enable privileged access management for the group we have just created:

Figure 5: Accessing Privileged access configuration from the group management

Figure 6: Enabling Privileged Access for the new group

Add eligible members to the group

Now we can add assignments and decide who should be active or eligible members of our new group.

Figure 7: Adding assignments

Figure 8: Reviewing a list of the eligible members

Set the new group to use as the super user group for AIP

The Set-AipServiceSuperUserGroup cmdlet specifies a group to use as the super user group for Azure Information Protection. Members of this group are then super users, which means they become an owner for all content that is protected by your organization. These super users can decrypt this protected content and remove protection from it, even if an expiration date has been set and expired. Typically, this level of access is required for legal eDiscovery and by auditing teams.

You can specify any group that has an email address, but be aware that for performance reasons, group membership is cached. For information about group requirements, see Preparing users and groups for Azure Information Protection.

Figure 9: Adding the new PIM-managed group as the super user group

Using the super user feature

Now that we have everything set up, let’s see what the end user (JIT administrator) experience is going to be.

First, for the sake of testing we are going to make sure that the test user can’t open a protected document he does not normally have access to.

Figure 10: Error indicating that the user does not have access to the protected document

It’s time to elevate our access using Azure PIM:

Figure 11: List of the PIM-managed privileged access groups

Figure 12: List of privileged groups the user is eligible for

Figure 13: Privileged group activation dialog

Figure 14: Verifying that the user has the privileged group activated

After that the user is able to access the protected document and remove or change protection settings if needed.

Figure 15: Accessing a protected document as a super user

If required by your company’s policy, you can secure this elevation process even further by enforcing MFA and approval

Figure 16: Customizing role activation options

For more information about role-assignable groups in Azure AD, see Use cloud groups to manage role assignments in Azure Active Directory.

Please also take a moment to review current limitations and known issues here.

Az Update: Azure Cloud Shell enhancements, Azure DB security enhancements and more

by Scott Muniz | Aug 14, 2020 | Azure, Microsoft, Technology, Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Lots of news surrounding Azure security and hybrid offerings this week. Here are a couple of the news items we are covering this week: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Data encryption enhancements announced, New Microsoft Learn Modules for Azure and Windows Server IT Pros, Exchange Server 2016 End of Mainstream Support and Azure Cloud Shell running in an isolated virtual network and tools image open sourced.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL Data encryption enhancements announced

Azure Database for PostgreSQL Infrastructure double encryption (preview)

The preview of infrastructure double encryption for Azure Database for PostgreSQL-single server is now available. Infrastructure double encryption adds a second layer of encryption using a FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic module and a different encryption algorithm which gives an additional layer of protection for your data at rest. The key used in Infrastructure Double encryption is also managed by this service. This feature is not turned on by default as it will have performance impact due to the additional layer of encryption.

Data encryption with customer managed keys for Azure DB for PostgreSQL-single server

Data encryption with customer-managed keys for Azure Database for PostgreSQL-single server enables you to bring your own key (BYOK) for data protection at rest. It also allows organizations to implement separation of duties in the management of keys and data. With customer-managed encryption, you are responsible for, and in a full control of, a key’s lifecycle, key usage permissions, and auditing of operations on keys.

New Microsoft Learn Modules for Azure and Windows Server IT Pros

Whether you’re just starting or an experienced professional, the hands-on approach helps you arrive at your goals faster, with more confidence and at your own pace. In the last couple of days, the team at Microsoft published a couple of new Microsoft Learn modules around Azure, Hybrid Cloud, and Windows Server for IT Pros. These modules help you to learn how you can leverage Microsoft Azure in a hybrid cloud environment to manage Windows Server.

Exchange Server 2016 and the End of Mainstream Support

Microsoft has announced that Exchange Server 2016 enters the Extended Support phase of its product lifecycle on October 14th, 2020.  During Extended Support, products receive only updates defined as Critical consistent with the Security Update Guide. For Exchange Server 2016, critical updates will also include any required product updates due to time zone definition changes. With the transition of Exchange Server 2016 to Extended Support, the quarterly release schedule of cumulative updates (CU) will end. The last planned CU for Exchange Server 2016, CU19, will be released in December 2020.

Azure Cloud Shell enhancements announced

Azure Cloud Shell can now run in an isolated virtual network (public preview)

Microsoft announced the public preview of Azure Cloud Shell running inside a private virtual network. This widely requested and optional feature allows you deploy a Cloud Shell container into an Azure virtual network that you control. Once you connect to Cloud Shell, you can interact with resources within the virtual network you selected. This allows you to connect to virtual machines that only have a private IP, use kubectl to connect to a Kubernetes cluster which has locked down access, or connect to other resources that are secured inside a virtual network.

The Azure Cloud Shell tools image is now open sourced

The Cloud Shell experience contains common command line tools to manage resources across both Azure and M365 and can now be found on GitHub. You can now file issues or pull requests directly to the tools image, and any changes that occur there will be reflected in the next release of Cloud Shell. You can use this container image in other management scenarios, with many tools already installed and updated regularly, removing the concern about updating your cloud management tools.

MS Learn Module of the Week

Implement hybrid identity with Windows Server

These hands-on-labs share details on how to configure an Azure environment so that Windows IaaS workloads requiring Active Directory are supported. You’ll also learn to integrate on-premises Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) environment into Azure.

Let us know in the comments below if there are any news items you would like to see covered in next week show.  Az Update streams live every Friday so be sure to catch the next episode and join us in the live chat.

Azure API Management limitation workaround: Return 404 instead of 405 when the HTTP method not match

by Scott Muniz | Aug 14, 2020 | Azure, Microsoft, Technology, Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

This article provides a workaround for the limitation on API Management for returning 404 Operation Not Found instead of 405 Method Not Allowed. There is a Azure feedback and the Stack overflow about this limitation.

Current Status for API Management

Defining API in APIM including creating the resources and allowed methods for each resource.

1. Define a POST API:

2. Test the API with POST method via Postman:

3. Change the HTTP Method to GET or other methods, it returns with 404 operation not found:

The error returned by APIM in this scenario does not follow the definition of HTTP status code strictly. There was feedback that this is still a limitation for APIM and product team updated that there is still no plan on it.

Workaround:

1. Handle the error

When APIM failed to identify an API or operation for the request, it will raise a configuration error which Responses the caller with 404 Resource Not Found. We need to handle this kind of configuration error by referring the Error Handling for APIM, this kind of error can be specified with configuration Error source and OperationNotFound Error reason.  We can define a policy to single API or all of our APIs to capture the error, and set the status code to HTTP 405.

2. Define the policy to all APIs:

Policy Code:

      <choose>
            <when condition="@(context.LastError.Source == "configuration" && context.LastError.Reason == "OperationNotFound")">
                <return-response>
                    <set-status code="405" reason="Method not allowed" />
                    <set-body>@{
                    return new JObject(
                        new JProperty("status", "HTTP 405"),
                        new JProperty("message", "Method not allowed"),
                        new JProperty("text", context.Response.StatusCode.ToString()),
                        new JProperty("errorReason", context.LastError.Message.ToString())
                    ).ToString();
                }</set-body>
                </return-response>
            </when>
            <otherwise />
        </choose>

You may wonder how the condition context.LastError.Source == “configuration” && context.LastError.Reason == “OperationNotFound” will specify this type of error, from the error OCP trace, we can see the an error is thrown with message in Configuration section “OperationNotFound”:

when this type error occurred during the evaluation, the error source will be captured as configuration. It will not forward request further. To exclude other configuration error, we need specify the error reason as “OperationNotFound”.

3. Test the API with wrong HTTP method:

Tested on all APIs and with all wrong methods, it will get 405 Method Not Allowed.

Related links:

Error Handling for APIM

Hope this can be useful!