My smart home journey started years ago with a simple Philips Hue configuration. After integrating Home Assistant, I wanted to have some door/window sensors and temperature sensors. I bought the Xiaomi Aqara bridge and implemented all the sensors into Home Assistant. I quickly realized I now have two Zigbee bridges due to the fact that both Philips and Xiaomi want a ‘customized’ standard. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I needed to do something… I was using multiple bridges because I heard some stories about connection losses around some USB bridges.
This week Microsoft quietly released some information about a new Azure solution called Azure Bastion. Azure Bastion acts as a gateway between a Virtual Machine in Azure and your session in the Azure Portal. This means that without assigning a Public IP address, you are able to connect to your Azure Virtual Machine through the Azure Portal. No Remote Desktop environment or jumpbox needed. Azure Bastion is currently in Private Preview.
In my last blog post, I introduced you to the solution I’m using on Office 365 to create personal e-mail addresses. This solution is hosted on Azure DevOps and is automatically released to the PowerShell Gallery. In this blog post, I will explain briefly how this works. The Azure DevOps project is hosted in a public repository. This was introduced recently and enables other users of the module to contribute to the project.
A secure email system is important to protect yourself from the increasing phishing and spam attacks, where hackers try to steal money on a large scale. More and more organizations hosting personal data are getting hacked, where hackers misuse this personal data to launch attacks. In this blog post I will introduce you to a solution I’ve created based on Office 365 and PowerShell to prevent that my email address is spread more widely on the internet.
Microsoft recently announced the Public Preview of the ability to run PowerShell code in an Azure Function. This means that the PowerShell code will run in a Platform-as-a-Service solution, completely serverless! You pay only for the time that you use the solution and you don’t have to manage the underlying infrastructure! In this blog post, I will show a practical example of how to use an Azure Function in combination with an Azure Logic App.
After passing the AZ-300 exam and being not too happy about the new exam experience, I liked this exam much better. Let me explain why. In my blog post about the AZ-300, I talked about the fact that you can run out of time quickly and that the exam was lacking transparency about the amount and type of questions you still have to do when compared to the time you have left.
