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.…

On Wednesday, Jan. 3, security researchers publicly detailed three potential vulnerabilities named “Meltdown” and “Spectre.” A pretty detailed description of the vulnerabilities can be found on Stratechery and a pretty good explanation for non-technical audience can be found on the Cloudflare blog. Exploited Vulnerability CVE Exploit Name Public Vulnerability Name Silicon Microcode Update Required on Host Spectre CVE-2017-5753 Variant 1 Bounds Check Bypass No Spectre CVE-2017-5715 Variant 2 Branch Target Injection Yes Meltdown CVE-2017-5754 Variant 3 Rogue Data Cache Load No In an environment where multiple servers are sharing capabilities (for example virtual machines hosted in a cloud or on premise environment ), these vulnerabilities could mean it is possible for someone to access information in one virtual machine from another.…

Probably all of you know that a vital part of Operations Management Suite Agent for Linux is based on open source data collector Fluentd. Those of you which are interested in OMS Agent for Linux should definitively take a look at the following presentations which were held at Open Source Summit Japan which took place from May 31 to June 2nd 2017 in Tokyo. Fluentd v1.0 in a nutshell by Nakagawa Masahiro…