Month: October 2017

AzureCloud

Essential tool for blurring Azure secrets for presentations and screen recordings

on October 24, 2017

azure-mask

For those that do Azure presentations / screen recordings you know that you often find yourself scrubbing out your sensitive and personal information such as subscription keys, email addresses, keys and connection strings. What if you could have this magically done for you?

Well let me introduce to you a handy Chrome extension called Azure Mask that will mask GUIDs (such as Subscription IDs), email addresses, keys, and connection strings with a blur. The intention of the extension is to make it easier to do screen recordings without revealing sensitive, personal, account information that may show up on screen.

NOTE: This extension will only run and apply against Azure portal URLs.

Features

  • Blurs GUIDs (such as Subscription IDs)
  • Blurs your account email
  • Hides the "Report a Bug" button (if found)
  • Toggle the mask on/off and store this state
  • Apply the mask (if enabled) after Document Object Model (DOM) mutations

Installing the Extension

As mentioned on the Azure Mask GitHub repository readme, you can install this extension in Chrome from either a package or from source. Let’s take a look at how we can install from source.

  1. Download or clone the repository: git clone git@github.com:clarkio/azure-mask.git
  2. Open up Chrome and bring up the extensions settings by typing in the address bar: chrome://extensions/
  3. Check the “Develop mode” option and click on Load unpacked extension button:image
  4. Navigate to where you cloned this repository and then choose path: /azure-mask/src
  5. Follow the prompts and then the extension will be available in Chrome:sshot-116

Using Azure Mask

After installing the Azure Mask extension in Chrome, navigate to your Azure portal and after signing in you will see all your Azure secrets magically blurred:

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If you want to turn off this extension, click on the Azure Mask extension button in Chrome to bring up the options:

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Enjoy!

References

Azure-Mask on GitHub

Development

The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update SDK is now available to download

on October 18, 2017

windows-10-fall-creators-update-sdk

The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update SDK is now available to download.

Want to catch up on what’s included in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, take a look at the Windows Developer Day keynote or dive deeper with 18 additional videos. The Windows Developer Day videos are now available to view here.

Enjoy!

References

Download the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update SDK

Watch the Windows Developer Day – Fall Creators Update keynote and other sessions

Cloud

Microsoft’s new Azure & AWS Cloud Service Map

on October 17, 2017

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Microsoft recently introduced a new Cloud Service Map to help customers and developers quickly compare the capabilities between Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform across all categories. You can leverage this guide for planning multi-cloud solutions or simply to migrate from AWS to Azure.

The cloud service map (PDF available for download) is broken out into 13 sections to make navigation between each service simple:

  1. Marketplace – Cloud marketplace services bring together native and partner service offerings to a single place, making it easier for customers and partners to understand what they can do.
  2. Compute – Compute commonly refers to the collection of cloud computing resources that your application can run on.
  3. Storage – Storage services offer durable, highly-available, and massively-scalable cloud storage for your application, whether it runs in the cloud or not.
  4. Networking & Content Delivery – Allows you to easily provision private networks, connect your cloud application to your on-premises datacenters, and more.
  5. Database – Database services refers to options for storing data, whether it’s a managed relational SQL database that’s globally distributed or multi-model NoSQL databases designed for any scale.
  6. Analytics and big data – Make the most informed decision possible by analyzing all of the data you need in real time.
  7. Intelligence – Intelligence services enable natural and contextual interaction within your applications, using machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities that include text, speech, vision, and search.
  8. Internet of Things (IoT) – Internet of Things (IoT) services connect your devices, assets, and sensors to collect and analyze untapped data.
  9. Management & monitoring – Management and monitoring services provide visibility into the health, performance, and utilization of your applications, workloads, and infrastructure.
  10. Mobile services – Mobile services enable you to reach and engage your customers everywhere, on every device. DevOps services make it easier to bring a higher quality app to market faster, and a number of engagement services make it easier to deliver performant experiences that feel tailored to each user.
  11. Security, identity, and access – A range of capabilities that protect your services and data in the cloud, while also enabling you to extend your existing user accounts and identities, or provisioning entirely new ones.
  12. Developer tools – Developer tools empower you to quickly build, debug, deploy, diagnose, and manage multi-platform, scalable apps and services.
  13. Enterprise integration – Enterprise integration makes it easier to build and manage B2B workflows that integrate with third-party software-as-a-service apps, on-premises apps, and custom apps.

This guidance is laid out in a convenient table that lets you quickly find and learn more about each of the services you’re most interested in. In this instance, you can quickly see the service name, description and the name of the services in AWS and Azure. Links are also provided for each of the Azure services.

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Enjoy!     

Additional Resources

Cloud Service Map for AWS and Azure Available Now

Downloadable PDF of the Cloud Service Map for AWS and Azure