We started the #CloudMarathoner community and cloud learning journey approximately 3.5 years ago with few posts and followers. My main intention in starting this hashtag is to help everyone learn the #cloudcomputing and share training resources that could help you in your awesome #cloud journey.
We continuously GROWING
Thank you for your continued feedback and support! Our community is almost 1400+ members string and we are able to reach and empower more people now.
Many Thanks to each of you, who has #shared and commented on #CloudMarathoner posts on social media.
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Thank you.. Thank you… Thank you.. For being a true #cloudmarathoner in learning the #cloud and sharing it with your community!
I would like to welcome everyone who is landed on this page to check out the Azure Spring Clean 2023 event and Learn new cloud skills!
Before kicking off the topic, I would like to start with a “THANK YOU” message for the organizers of the event; especially for Joe, Thomas, and everyone who is involved in making this event a successful experience for everyone!
Note:
Introduction
In the spirit of Azure Spring Clean, we will explore how to organize Azure Security Services using the infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) approach with Azure Bicep.
We will look into how you could declaratively define and deploy your Azure security resources including Azure Policies to tackle real-world business problems. So, get yourself ready for simple yet powerful demos that will turn you into a hero.
And don’t worry, if you are new to Azure Bicep as we will have a super express introduction to this new IaC language to get you started with fundamentals.
Azure Bicep is a new declarative Domain Specific Language (DSL) for provisioning Azure resources. The purpose of Azure Bicep is to simplify the resource creation and management experience with a cleaner syntax and more code reuse.
Declaring resources as IaC
There are many benefits in declaring and managing cloud infrastructure resources as a code. It provides benefits, such as increased compliance, visibility, controlled deployments and versioning of changes that get deployed into your cloud environments.
The following screenshot demonstrates how Azure Bicep declares cloud resources on the left side of the panel:
Organizing cloud resources
No matter how small or big is your project, taking time to think through the approach of how to organize your digital assets is an important task. In Microsoft Azure, you would need to consider a couple of points while trying to make this decision. Namely, you would need to consider the following factors:
Resource Governance approach
Management scopes
IaC management options
Modules, ACR, Template Specs, etc.
Azure Policies for governance
The Azure Policies are assigned with a unique mission to guard the compliance aspect of your cloud resources and workloads. It evaluates resources at specific times (by default happens every 24 hours) during the resource lifecycle changes and the policy assignment lifecycle updates.
Thus, whenever you get a resource created, updated, or deleted within a scope of the monitored compliance, or if you update/create an Azure policy then the compliance evaluation cycle will determine the compliance of these changes by auditing, blocking, or allowing the action to be performed.
Securing storage account options
Note: this section of the post is in progress… It will be presented with the screenshots and GitHub repo for you. Stay tuned, and check in a few days 😉
video & Demo – a sweet combo
In the video below, I briefly cover the posted information in this blog post which also includes the instructions on how to run the demo and get the scripts to deploy Azure Policies for your Tag Governance scenario.
Without any overdue, here is the video that should be available to you:
The following image is a screenshot from the slide that demonstrates the Bicep code that declares the policy definition and initiative, with the final view of deployment on the Azure portal.
Thank you so much for reading this post and learning about Azure security and compliance and how IaC language Azure Bicep can help you in this journey. This is a bit different perspective to strengthen your resource/workload compliance on Azure using IaC approach.
Please, keep up the good work by securing your organizational and customer cloud environments!
I have been getting a strange error on the Azure Bicep Insert functionality on my laptop, while it was working as expected on my work laptop.
Thus, I started to compare Azure Bicep versions and extension plugin versions on VS Code. Even though, both have the same versions, I was getting the following errors:
ChainedTokenCredential failed due to an unhandled exception
“Caught exception fetching resource: The ChainedTokenCredential failed due to an unhandled exception: Azure CLI authentication failed due to an unknown error. See the troubleshooting guide for more information.”
After a couple of hours of troubleshooting, I was getting a different error:
“Caught exception fetching resource: The ChainedTokenCredential failed due to an unhandled exception: Azure PowerShell authentication failed due to an unknown error. See the troubleshooting guide for more information.”
First thing first, I have eliminated the possibility of Azure authentication not working on my VS Code, by running the following commands and seeing the results:
Issues that helped to dig for a fix
I was seeing an error: “The system cannot find the path specified.”. This was in my Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell consoles.
Here are the screenshots of the errors that I was seeing:
Resolving path issues
First, I checked all my paths in Environment Variables on my Windows laptop, and there were 1-2 unresolved paths that I removed.
Cleanup of the Registry AutoRun
The next step was removing any Auto Run values that I may have in Win Registry. This last step was helpful to resolve all the errors on Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell.
In Summary
At the end of the troubleshooting and after a couple of hours of banging my head into the wall, I was happy that the Path and “ChainedTokenCredential failed” issues had been resolved.
Thank you for reading my post and I hope this post has helped you to troubleshoot the issues that you may have.
If your issue is still not resolved after following my post, please reach back to me.
I am really excited and happy to see my session is accepted ✅ for this year’s #AzureSpringClean2023 event 🎉
What is Azure Spring Clean?
The Azure Spring Clean 2023 is an event that promotes well-managed Azure tenants. In order to achieve this goal, organizers encourage the cloud community professionals to create articles that highlight best-practices, and lessons learned, and help with some of the more difficult topics of Azure Management.
Session details
Join me this March, to learn and explore 🔍 how to organize Azure Security Services using the IaC approach with Azure Bicep.
We will look into how you could declaratively define and deploy your Azure security resources including Azure Policies to tackle real-world business problems. Thus, get yourself ready for simple yet powerful demos that will turn you into a hero.
In Summary
I would highly encourage everyone to join this event and learn best practices on Azure this spring!
In this post, I will be addressing a common an error that could be seen in your GitHub actions, once in a while, called “Error: Az CLI Login failed. Please check the credentials and make sure az is installed on the runner”.
As I always say and post about this slogan: The #cloudjourney and learning never stops ⛅❗🏃♂️ 🏃♀️ – I try to stay true to that spirit as well.
New 2023 exam is a pass!
I have officially got certified in @Google Cloud and am happy to share that with you. Yay!
This cert focuses on teaching you how to articulate the capabilities of Google Cloud core products and services and how they benefit organizations. The candidate for this cert exam should be able to describe common business use cases and how Google Cloud solutions support an enterprise.
This certification is for individuals who wish to demonstrate their knowledge of cloud computing basics and how Google Cloud products and services can be used to achieve an organization’s goals.
The Cloud Digital Leader exam assesses your knowledge in the following areas:
As I always say this motto: The #cloudjourney and learning never stops
What is the Microsoft SOC exam?
I am happy to share that I was able to pass an Azure security certificate before the end of 2022!!!
As you might know, this certification belongs to an important Microsoft Security operations space. I am very glad to finish this year with this achievement.
Studying for this certification helped me gain the skills and knowledge required to reduce my organization’s risk by rapidly remediating active attacks on the environment, advising on improvements to threat protection practices, and referring violations of organizational policies to appropriate people and teams.
As an important part of the exam preparation, I did labs that investigate, respond to, and hunt for threats using Microsoft products, such as Azure Defender, Azure Sentinel, Microsoft 365 Defender, and other related security products.
Summary
Please, let me know if you are targeting this certification. I would be more than glad to provide additional guidance for your preparations!
Thank you everyone for your greetings and wishes on social media. I do really appreciate your continued support!!!
I am very glad to announce the latest stats and progress on our community repo “Awesome Azure Bicep”!
What is Awesome Azure Bicep
This is a GitHub repo that helps you to learn and discover resources that are helping you with the adoption of Azure Bicep – a new #infrastructureascode approach to manage Azure resources.
We started the #CloudMarathoner community and cloud learning journey approximately 3.5 years ago with few posts and followers. Our intention is to help everyone learn the #cloudcomputing and share training resources that could help you to #upskill and start your awesome #cloud career.
As I mentioned in a previous post, we are in a festive December month with a great event! The Festive Tech Calendar is in a full swing and presents new sessions to everyone, every day.
If you missed my live session, No problem. I have recorded it and you can re-watch it 🙂
Check this session below, if you want to learn important things on how to configure your Azure Bicep environment and use Azure security resources with them!
Bicep – a new 
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