Today my manager asked me about my research into using RabbitMQ as a backup in case Azure Service Bus ever goes down.

Me: "Good. The way we designed the framework, all we have to do is drop the DLLs into the directory, update the config, and the services will start using RabbitMQ."
Mgr: "Excellent. Probably should be looking into using RabbitMQ as a permanent replacement for Azure"
Me: "What? The whole reason we moved to Azure was to eliminate the problems with having an on prem service bus. Since we've switched, there has been zero downtime."
Mgr: "That's what VP-Joe is afraid of. If Azure ever goes down, he won't know how to explain Azure to the president as to why we're not taking orders or can't ship packages."
Me: "That makes no sense. What did VP-Joe tell the president when a database goes down or a server mis-configuration?"
Mgr: "President understands internal outages, its just the whole 'cloud' thing he doesn't understand."
Me: "Um..then VP-Joe needs to explain it to him?"
Mgr: "The decision has already been made. Are you on board? Lets look at this move as a cost savings."
Me: "You mean the $10 a month? How much hardware will we need to support RabbitMQ?"
Mgr: "Yea, nobody probably thought of that."
Me: "I'm on board with whatever decision, but I'd like a little more than VP-Joe being afraid of the president."
Mgr: "I'm sure its not being afraid."
Me: "..."
Mgr: "OK, lets wait and see if VP-Joe forgets about this and moves on to something new."

Setup my port honeypot today finally, including port 22, then wrote a custom dashboard for some data tracking, feels great to have it open on my screen seeing the bans just roll in every 2 seconds of refresh, the highest hits are as expected from china, russia and india, also filed ~700 reports and already got 300 banned from their service. (mainly Microsoft Azure for whatever reason)

I wanted to first automate that (or atleast blacklist report to various IP lists via API), but then I was afraid that I'll be one day stupid enough to somehow get banned - don't want myself to get reported lol

I have never doubted my abilities more, before this happened:

I got a Linux VM on Azure, downloaded apache httpd source which I proceeded to configure, make and install.

As expected, install failed with something related to apr and apr-util.

Searched several mailing lists, tried out several configure options, nothing worked..

After almost an hour, it stuck to me, all I had to do was "sudo yum install httpd" !!!

Disappointed that I missed something so simple, but when I did that, it came back with 'Nothing to do'...

Realized, httpd was pre-installed in that VM.. I just had to start the service !!!

:facepalm

Won the 2nd prize in a Microsoft hosted hackathon. No for Windows but they really have good cognitive services. Used Azure vision api, one of the good ocr service available.

After 'Dev' deployed a service using Azure ServiceBus, a particular queue/client was receiving errors.

Dev: "Looking at the logs, client is getting faulted."
Me: 'What is the error being logged?'
Dev: 'Client is faulted'
Me: 'No, that is our error when the client is either unable to connect or there is an exception in the middle of sending a message. What is the exception from Azure?'
Dev: 'Client is faulted. That's it. I'm going to have to re-engineer the code to implement a retry policy.'
<OK, I smell someone cooking up some solution finding, so I dig into the logs a little further>
Me: "Looks like an invalid connection string. The actual exception being thrown and logged is from the Azure client connection string builder. The value cannot be null."
Dev: "No, I'm looking right at the connection string in the config. Looks fine."
Me: "Looks correct on your machine, but what is actually being deployed to the server?"
<I could tell he was getting agitated>
<Dev clicks around, about 10 min. later>
Dev: "Aha!..I found it. The connection string in the config on the main branch is wrong, in fact, the entry is missing."
<dev fixes, re-deploys, life is good, I document the error and the root cause>
Boss: "Great job Dev."

*sigh* ..go teamwork?

It seems Microsoft have taken my critique of Azure last week to heart. Last week, I insinuated that perhaps hometime on Friday was an inconvenient time of day for major downtime.

This week they've rectified their previous fault, and in their great mercy have decided to take down service at the busiest time of the day on Thursday instead.

So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.

Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….

My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.

After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …

So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???

Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...

Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.

First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself

Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.

My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).

Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.

And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...

And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."

Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...

What cloud service does DevRant use?

Aws Or Azure?
And how much do you pay a month for maintenance costs?

What tables to store data? MongoDB, dynamoDB, oracle?
Or S3 streams?

Just wondering.

I get some error when deleting an azure service so I put a support ticket asking for help. Just as I am about to close my computer for the day I receive an email saying:

"Product team will disable the account xxxxx from backend".

The xxxxx is our subscription number. The subscription that hosts not only that service but also production servers and databases, storage accounts containing backups, etc.

I replied to the email so hopefully disaster is avoided otherwise tomorrow wont be a happy day.

Stakeholder: Users are unable to buy tickets on the website. IT says Azure’s health check is showing an unhealthy status.

[It’s Sunday. Web Engineering is not on call so no one sees this right away.]

Stakeholder: IT restarted the Azure website twice, but users still can’t place orders.

Me: There was never an issue with the Azure site. That health check is inaccurate. There is a rewrite rule that sends the Azure supplied domain to our custom domain. The Azure health check doesn’t like that so it returns an unhealthy status. The problem is the ticketing server that the website has to communicate with. The ticketing server is overwhelmed and can’t handle more requests. IT should have checked the ticketing server’s logs. This has happened before and it’s never been an Azure issue. It’s a ticketing server issue.

Stakeholder and IT: Oops 😅

—-

JFC. Stop trying to make this web engineering’s problem. Stop trying to make it look like engineering dropped the ball. The ticketing server has experienced this issue multiple times. The ticketing server is maintained by a different team. The website’s symptoms are always the same and there are steps you need to take before you make the decision to restart the website, which will cause the website to show a blue screen of death that says 503 service unavailable for a few minutes. And we have a switch to shut off all transactions. Why do you not want to use it when it’s clear the website can’t process transactions???

Trying to use authenticate a JWT token from an Azure service, which apparently needs to use Azure AD Identity services (Microsoft Entra ID, Azure AD B2C, pick your poison). I sent a request to our Azure admin. Two days later, I follow up, "Sorry, I forgot...here you go..."
Sends me a (small) screenshot of the some of the properties+GUIDs I need, hoping I don't mess up, still missing a few values.
Me: "I need the instance url, domain, and client secret."
<hour later>
T: "Sorry, I don't understand what those are."
Me: "The login URL. I assume it's the default, but I can't see what you see. Any shot you can give me at least read permissions so I can see the various properties without having to bother you?"
T: "I don't see any URLs, I'll send you the config json, the values you need should be in there."
<10 minutes later, I get a json file, nothing I needed>
<find screenshots of what I'm looking for, send em to T>
Me: "The Endpoints, what URLs do you see when you click Endpoints?"
<20 minutes later, sends me the list of endpoints, exactly what I'm looking for, but still not authenticating the JWT>
Me: "Still not working. Not getting an error, just that the authentication is failing. Don't know if it's the JWT, am I missing a slash, or what. Any way I can get at least read permissions so I don't have to keep bugging you to see certain values?"
T: "What do you need, exactly?"
Me: "I don't know. I don't know if I'm using the right secret key, I can't verify if I'm using the right client id. I feel like I'm guessing trying to make this work."
T: "What exactly are you trying to get working?"
<explain, again, what I'm trying to do>
T: "That's probably not going to work. We don't allow AD authentication from the outside world."
Me: "Yes we do. Microsoft Teams, Outlook, the remote access services. I can log into those services from home using my AD credentials."
T: "Oh yea, I guess we do. I meant what you are trying to do. Azure doesn't allow outside services to authenticate using a JWT. Sorry."

FRACK FRACK FRACK!!

Whew! Putting the flamethrower away.

Thanks devrant for letting me rant.

IBM Cloud seems to be the only cloud computing platform that has a responsive website.

Admittedly I have only used GCP and AWS, I haven't touched Azure yet. Both GCP and AWS have incredibly slow web portals that take ages to load after every single click.

IBM Cloud is the only cloud service platform when I clicked a button and it loaded the next page like a normal website. It honestly felt surreal to navigate through all of their services. I have no clue why AWS and GCP are both so bad, it reflects really poorly on their services. If they can't get their own web portals to run quickly, why should I expect their services to be fast and reliable?

Simple question, I'm writing a coding course that does some cloud stuff.

Which cloud providers actually allow you to limit spending without some stupid "setup a service to nuke everything" fuckery?

As far as I can tell, Azure and Oracle. It's stupid how often this is raised as a concern for beginners and how hard it is to actually limit.

Azure. Its so vast has something for just about anything, and isn't crazy expensive if you implement whatever it is you're doing with cost in mind.

Used different features of it at old companies Storage (blob/table), service bus, application insights, app centre, event hub, functions etc...

Currently at a company that is slowly moving over to Azure which is a great process to be apart of. Get to spend a lot of time investigating what is available as it seems each and every time I come to use it, its grown substantially.

Microsoft is buying GitHub?

Actually, that sounds great. A lot of people here are making it sound like this is the end of the world as we know it, but how do we know that they will make it awful? The Microsoft of today is different than the Microsoft of 2007. The purchase is simply a way to expand their enterprise offerings. I have experimented with Office365, and it is actually really useful. GitHub will be a way to expand that offering to software development companies.

Who knows? We may even get some kind of Azure CI service built directly into GitHub repos?

However, I see why some people are concerned. If they want to move to GitLab, I don't actually blame them a bit. I was already using it before it was cool!

The point of this rant is that we should give Microsoft a chance, and not jump ship right away.

With the advent of everything being a service (read AWS, GCP, Azure) do you think it's time for our education curriculum to incorporate these services at a an earlier stage (say undergrad) since in the industry, this is kind of enough to make a decent living (speaking more from a devops perspective, programmers are still needed I feel)??

3 weeks into getting dragged into another MS-stack project, I have already been repeatedly reminded why I decided to invest so much energy in moving my career as far away from Microsoft dependency as possible. Even something as simple as reviewing settings on Azure App Service is a hit-or-miss affair, being completely unavailable for hours at a time at least once a week. Azure Functions are consistently unavailable for at least a few minutes every day. Don't even get me started on "Azure DevOps".

Why the fuck do people still place their trust (and critical infrastructure) in the hands of Microsoft?

!help

Does anyone know how to use certbot on a Debian stretch azure web service app to generate an SSL cert?

I've got the cert generated and Apache to serve it but it's giving me errors.

I need to bind it in azure somehow but I can't figure out how to export the cert.

Azure, great development slots! Must have, now I can have developer, staging and production. The greatest no downtime when swapping a new server in....

Everything crashes? WTF?

OKAY, so swapping to a service that authenticates users makes the authentication part crash :/

Phew development slots ROLL BACK...

No the entire service was broken. Rolling back, all non authenticating controllers work, but the authentication never happens, so server is working, but the users cant use it. Fuck!

Delete everything. Recreate. The setting persists. WTF. Delete again, recreate, reinitialize, republish, it works as it should when tested phew.

Creating new service experiencing cant replicate. Hmm, okay must have been a glitch. Next, update, YEAH swap, no downtime!!!

*EXPLOSION* ..... RINSE AND REPEAT:/

So Microsoft and github...

You can always host gitlab youreself if you är concerned about someone else running the service. I did some years ago. But the question is why not use the free services? I'll stay using github or gitlab as long as it's free... I use VSTS att work and have no problem using Microsoft products as long as they do what they är suposed to...

But if youre reely upset. The community edition of gitlab is free so you can host youre own instance in youre basement or in a cloud... AWS, GCP, Azure... Then you own the data.

Don't you just hate it when there seems to be nothing but in some ways lacking solutions to a definite task in your capability arsenal? Or rather, I don't really know how I should feel about it... I've been developing this solution to receive a 3DES encrypted Azure Service Bus message, decrypting it and chewing the output XML down so as to be digestible to the PHP application whose API the message gets delegated to... but there just seems to be no perfect solution: subscribing to the event topic straight from the target app just... doesn't seem to work properly, a Python implementation.... well, let's just leave it at that... a Node.js implementation would require TS and completely rewriting a proprietary library with 100+ complex types - also, there's some hiccups with both the subscription and the decryption...

I started with an F# implementation (after deeming the PHP one flawed), and it seems it's still the best. But goddamn it I had problems with it on the dotnet core side of thing (decryption output incorrect), so I had to switch to dotnet framework... Now finally everything crucial is peachy, but I can't seem to be able to implement a working serialized domain model pipeline to validate the decrypted message and convert it to something easier to digest for the target application (so that I could use the existing API endpoint instead of writing a new one / heavily modifying the existing implementation and fear breaking something in the process...). I probably could do it in C#, I don't know, but for the love of Linus I'm not going to do it if I can avoid it, when implementing the same functionality I have now without the Dto and Domain type modules would take 3x LoC than the current F# implementation incl. the currently unused modules!

And then there's the problem of deployment... I have no idea what's the best way to deploy a dotnet framework module to an app completely based on MAMP running on a mostly 10yo AWS cloud solution. If I implemented a PHP or Node.js solution, it'd be a piece of cake, but... Phew, I don't know. This is both frustrating, overwhelming and exciting at the same time.

What's the best service for managing large amounts of session data in Azure - servers are going behind a load balancer this week and we have too many options for storing session state

Any one thoughts/opinions about Azure Service Bus? I'm using it a few months now in combination with a redis cache, cloud storage and the service bus.. works pretty nice so far..

I'm pretty impressed about the upgrade mechanism..

If you ever added your credit card just to test the Azure Free Trial Subscription in hopes of removing it when the trial is over. I'm sorry man, you're fucked! Like right in the ass!

This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :

• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*

Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.

While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.

The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!

Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.

One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.

Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.

I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.

bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)

--------------------------

There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!

• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))

Can you disable a VPN VNet gateway service on Azure when you don't need it?

Getting conflicting info from our cloud provider (who I no longer trust to assist because they don't know what they're doing) and forum posts about the same question on Microsoft and I don't know what to believe.

I can't experiment, because it'll probably cost the company money and I can't do shit without getting permission and submitting some kind of business case for things that will potentially cost money.

Halp meh, plz... I have run across a problem and I have absolutely no idea how to go about solving it...

So basically I need to decrypt a TDES encrypted Azure service bus message. Can be done in a straightforward manner in .NET Framework solution with just your regular old System.Security.Cryptography namespace methods. As per MSDN docs you'd expect it to work in a .NET Core solution as well... No, no it doesn't. Getting an exception "Padding is invalid and cannot be removed". Narrowed the cause down to just something weird and undocumented happening due to Framework <> Core....

And before someone says 'just use .NET Framework then', let me clarify that it's not a possibility. While in production it could be viable, I'm not developing on a Windows machine...

How do I go about solving this issue? Any tips and pointers?

Just found out it’s pronounced Microsoft Arr-sure like “sure” in pressure and not Microsoft Arr-zu-ray.

-- Have you ever self hosted a Linux/Free Bsd server at home?
-- What was the maintenance like in terms of operation and cost compared to an online service?

I and my partner are planning to self host our Ubuntu server locally because currently though we spend less than $1100 a month on Azure with moderate CPU usage but we plan to scale out with believes that the server cost might sky-rocket.

We made a budget of $25k for the setup which includes cost of hardware, bandwidth and power.

We also made some research concerning most used hardwares for home servers because we really are newbees talk of hardware. What we found are options related to the Intel Xeon as CPU, some others say use NAS, while some are more of advertising.

$25k on the desk,
we care more about speed than of space. How can we make the setup totally worth it? You don't have to spare us a change, just some headlight and way to go.
Your advice are needed. Thank you.

Sound off below - I need recs for a good cloud compute service that gives me VMDK (or similar) golden image import and complete control over network topology, other than AWS, Azure, GCP or DO. Linode is also preferably off the table unless someone has a good reason for them (they are very privacy invasive).

What do you recommend?

!rant

Have deployed wordpress site to MS Azure App service with Mysql (in app purchase - from ClearDb). Problem is that TTFB is very high ( 30-50 sec) even site is not cold.
Note: - Always Available is ON
Please suggest me anything I am missing here.