During christmas vacations I added a Time Machine network drive for the backup of my MacBook to my Ubuntu 22.04 based home server.

For this you will need samba and avahi-daemon packages. Basically Samba shares the network drive and avahi makes it work with apple devices by implementing Apple’s Zeroconf architecture (also known as “Rendezvous” or “Bonjour”).

Finding the right samba configuration took me a while, but with the approach below the network drive automatically showed up in the Time Machine settings and I was able to add it as a Time Machine backup location on my MacBook running MacOS Ventura.

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This post should serve as an overview on all things related to Microsoft datacenters in Switzerland. Microsoft announced that they will expand its cloud services to Switzerland in 2019 by adding two cloud regions located in the cantons of Geneva and Zurich. Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 will be delivered from Switzerland. Sources say that Microsoft is building its Swiss cloud services with e-shelter for Zurich region and Safe Host for Geneva region (which is actually most probably in the canton of Vaud, as the Safe Host Datacenter in Gland is much bigger and newer than the one in Geneva).

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There are lot of discussions going on about how a company can make sure that their infrastructure running in the cloud is and stays compliant. Being compliant in cloud environments can be a challenge. The boundary between infrastructure and application responsibilities is becoming increasingly blurred. DevOps teams distribute both infrastructure and application code and are also responsible for application security. In order to ensure that the infrastructure in the cloud is compliant with the specifications of the respective company, it must be continuously checked and tested.

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Azure isolated virtual machine instances are isolated to a specific hardware type and dedicated to a single customer. When utilizing an isolated size Azure guarantees that your virtual machine will be the only one running on that specific server instance. Unfortunately Azure does not (yet) offer a broad variety of dedicated (or isolated how it is called in Azure jargon) virtual machine instances. At time of writing customers can only choose of seven different sizes when they want to use isolated virtual machines. This is ridiculously little compared to AWS, where customers can choose from more than 70 different dedicated instance sizes. AWS also offers EC2 dedicated hosts which is a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to customer use.

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There will be a point in time where you have to migrate an existing Azure pay as you go (PAYG) subscription to your Enteprise Agreement. Imagine your company bought a small and innovative startup which is working with Azure. However they did not have an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft yet and are paying their Azure bills by credit card. Not what you want in an enterprise environment.

Basically there are two options how you can integrate PAYG subscriptions into an existing Enterprise Agreement. Either you can move the Azure account with all associated subscriptions or you can move individual subscriptions.

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Azure (or any other cloud) customers normally are very interested in how much money a given project or application is burning. Microsoft provides multiple instruments to manage cost including Azure Cost Management (powered by Cloudyn). Azure Cost Management can help you to manage cost for your Azure and other cloud environments by providing you the tools to monitor, allocate, and optimize your cloud costs. For example, Cloudyn helps you manage budgets at a workload level and monitoring the spend on cloud services.

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Since I was dealing with Azure ExpressRoute lately, I will try to summarize some important aspects in a blog post to provide kind of a high-level overview of Azure ExpressRoute.

To get started, one should know that there are basically three options to connect on premise networks to Microsoft Azure:

1. Internet
2. Virtual Private Network (VPN)
3. Azure ExpressRoute

Both internet and VPN connections may be suitable for you. When you are based in countries where good Internet connectivity is available (e.g. Switzerland), a VPN connection may be sufficient for most of the scenarios.

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The Azure CLI is one of Azure’s command-line experiences for managing Azure resources (besides Azure PowerShell). Azure CLI is open source and built on Python. The cool thing about Azure CLI is that you can use it with pretty much all known platforms like macOS, Windows and Linux. This means you do not have to learn another command line tool for each platform.

When working with Azure CLI on Linux in a corporate environment it might happen to you, that creating a VM fails with the following error message:

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Choosing a cloud provider sometimes seems like a marriage. The choice you make may (hopefully) be the right one for the rest of your life. Compared to choosing the right cloud provider, finding the right girl or boy pretty much seems like a piece of cake. Love at first sight. Boooom! No one - or the minority of people at least - seriously considers comparing features, revenue, testimonials or market share before asking him or her to tie the band of their life’s. Yes, maybe there are actually some people doing this but lets forget about them for now…

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Policies in Azure are great! They can help you to enforce different rules and actions over your resources, so that they stay compliant with your corporate standards. For example they let you control in which location resources have to be deployed or you can have a policy to allow only certain type of virtual machines. Another policy may require that all resources have assigned a certain tag.

Policies are available for quite some time now. But when you were working with policies already, you probably noticed that management of all policies within one or even more Azure subscriptions can be challenging. That is why Microsoft announced a brand new UI for Azure Policy at Ignite conference 2017. It enables you to manage policies easily across many subscriptions in one single place and even monitors compliance status of your resource

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