Category: Azure

If you have storage blobs containing things like backups or files then Azure now has Immutable storage available for Azure Storage Blobs generally available in all public regions.

Immutable means that it is unable to change or be changed and this means that if a customer has let’s say a backup then they can store this unchanged which for some companies is very nice to have.

To take advantage or to test out immutable storage lets go through what we need to do to test it out.

• First of all, create a storage account.
• Click on Containers and create a new container, give it a name and choose Private (no anonymous access).
• Once created click on the name of your new container and then upload some files.
• Once you have uploaded some files click on Access Policy on the left-hand side, notice we have 2 sections, Stored access policies and Immutable blob storage, under Immutable blob storage, select Add policy.
• We now have 2 options to choose from
  • Time-based retention
  • Legal hold
    

Time-based retention allows us to add a number of days value between 1 day and 400 years, this also makes the files immutable.

Note:- You cannot change this value to 0 at any time. Once the interval you add expires – Upon the expiration of the retention interval, the data will continue to be in a non-modifiable state but can be deleted. Retention policy changes may require some time to take effect. 5 edits are permitted to the policy.

Legal hold retention means you add a tag to the blob container – each legal hold policy needs to be associated with 1 or more tags. Tags are used as a name identifier, such as a case ID, to categorize and view records.

You cannot delete or modify any files with the container whilst there is either a Time-based retention policy or a Legal hold policy, however if you delete the legal hold policy you can then delete or modify files with the container.
With Time-based retention, you can allow additionally protected appends and change the retention interval.
Time-based retentions need to be locked in order to be active and to add a lock click on the 3 dots and choose Lock policy.

Note:- Once you apply the lock you cannot delete the lock and just before you click save on applying the lock you will see the following reminder:-

Summary
I can see some people having the need to keep backups and have them immutable for a number of legal reasons and this new feature will be very handy for them.

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I had a task at work where I was asked if I could ensure that all new Azure Virtual Machines created had the default of being set up for English (United Kingdom) rather than English (United States), not an unreasonable request by any stretch, so last week I had a look into doing just that.

The customer project I am working on uses Virtual Machines for people to do their work and the new Virtual Machines are deployed using Octopus Deploy with some ARM templates and PowerShell – all good so far.

My initial thought was I wonder why you can’t have this as an option to choose when installing a new Virtual Machine from the portal, turns out its unlikely because in fact there are a number of settings you need to change in order for the new Virtual Machine to truly be set up for English (United Kingdom) rather than English (United States).

I started off by looking at running some PowerShell into a custom extension and running that when the Virtual Machine starts, after a lot of fiddling around and trying things it does work.

The PowerShell I was using looked something like this:-

Set-WinSystemLocale en-GB
Set-WinUserLanguageList -LanguageList en-GB -Force
Set-Culture -CultureInfo en-GB
Set-WinHomeLocation -GeoId 242
Set-TimeZone "GMT Standard Time"

# restart virtual machine to apply regional settings to current user. You could also do a logoff and login.
Start-sleep -Seconds 40
Restart-Computer

Note that the above PowerShell works, the only caveat to this is that once the Virtual Machine is available to connect to you can check the system local from

Control Panel > Clock and Region > Region > Administrative Tab >

Above, we can see that the Virtual Machine still defaults to English (United States) but with a reboot that will change to English (United Kingdom).

We want this to be the case for all users who might log onto the Virtual Machine, we could use PowerShell DSC (desired state config) to do this or a number of other ways.

When I reached out to twitter for some help and guidance on this I had a number of replies but this one was the solution I went for https://twitter.com/stuartpreston/status/1284096930981847045

Stuart was very kind to even create a GitHub repo to tackle this issue and you can find his solution to the problem there, he adds a custom script variable, passes in the commands to run and a timezone variable and “it’s basically using a combination of stuffing your script into customdata and having additionalUnattendContent run that script in a first logon.“

To wrap this up it works: –

• using PowerShell
• using a custom extension with a PowerShell script
• or by adding content to an Arm Template that runs a script upon user logon

• Don’t forget to checkout my YouTube Channel.

A while back I took part in a really cool hackathon at the Microsoft offices in Edinburgh and part of it was displaying data on an Azure Map. Now we found the docs a little less than straightforward so I put together a quick blog post and a GitHub repo

Log into Azure and create an Azure Maps Account, once you have done this gran the authentication key from the Authentication area and then grab the primary key, and then I pasted this into the html file.

I used this in the Azure Advent Calendar Maps page just zoom in to see more people.

Anyways Azure Maps has a tonne of functionality which you can read about a bit more.

Don’t forget to checkout my YouTube channel.

Enjoy!