Time zone misconfigurations — especially those affecting Daylight Saving Time (DST) — can cause:
Windows doesn’t always honour DST automatically, particularly in Azure VMs, automated deployments, or custom images.
When building out cloud-hosted or automated deployments of Windows Servers, especially for UK-based organisations, it’s easy to overlook regional settings. But these seemingly small configurations — like date/time formats, currency symbols, or keyboard layouts — can have a big impact on usability, application compatibility, and user experience.
In this post, I’ll show how I automate this using a simple PowerShell script that sets all relevant UK regional settings in one go.
Using Shared Access Signature (SAS) tokens with azcopy is common — but rotating tokens and handling them securely can be a hassle. To improve security and simplify our automation, I recently replaced SAS-based authentication in our scheduled AzCopy jobs with Azure User Assigned Managed Identity (UAMI).
In this post, I’ll walk through how to:
azcopy login to authenticate non-interactivelyStoring SQL usernames and passwords in application configuration files is still common practice — but it poses a significant security risk. As part of improving our cloud security posture, I recently completed a project to eliminate plain text credentials from our app connection strings by switching to Azure User Assigned Managed Identity (UAMI) authentication for our SQL Managed Instance.
In this post, I’ll walk through how to:
sqlcmd CLIOver the course of this blog series, we've successfully completed the Cloud Resume Challenge using Terraform as our infrastructure-as-code tool. Let's recap what we've accomplished:
The final architecture we've created looks like this:
The most valuable aspect of this project is that we've built a completely automated, production-quality cloud solution. Every component is defined as code, enabling us to track changes, rollback if needed, and redeploy the entire infrastructure with minimal effort.
In our previous posts, we built the frontend and backend components of our cloud resume project. Now it's time to take our implementation to the next level by implementing continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) with GitHub Actions.
In our previous posts, we set up the frontend infrastructure for our resume website using Terraform. Now it's time to build the backend API that will power our visitor counter.
In the previous post, we set up our Terraform environment and outlined the architecture for our Cloud Resume Challenge project. Now it's time to start building! In this post, we'll focus on deploying the first component: the static website that will host our resume.
The Cloud Resume Challenge is a hands-on project designed to build a real-world cloud application while showcasing your skills in AWS, serverless architecture, and automation. Many implementations of this challenge use AWS SAM or manual setup via the AWS console, but in this series, I will demonstrate how to build the entire infrastructure using Terraform. 💡
When I first discovered the Cloud Resume Challenge, I was immediately intrigued by the hands-on approach to learning cloud technologies. Having some experience with traditional IT but wanting to transition to a more cloud-focused role, I saw this challenge as the perfect opportunity to showcase my skills.
I chose Terraform over AWS SAM or CloudFormation because:
This series reflects my personal journey through the challenge, including the obstacles I overcame and the lessons I learned along the way.
In this guide, you'll learn how to:
✅ Set up Application Insights on an IIS-based web farm.
✅ Configure Log Analytics, Data Collection Rules, and Data Collection Endpoints.
✅ Use PowerShell to install the Application Insights agent.
✅ Monitor live metrics, failures, performance, and logs in real-time.
By the end, you'll have a fully monitored IIS-based web farm using Azure! 🎯