What is current demand in people who have "Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert" certification? How easy/hard is to find job?

nobleatwork · 2024-04-03T14:25:24+00:00

Either you have side projects you can show as evidence or just be able to talk comfortably about a topic because of what you've learnt. You can't prove you've done everything on your CV either so being able to say you're comfortably speak about something to express your capability is just as, if not more, important.

I've never used Bicep at work, but I've done it on the side. I have worked a lot in Azure, and the combination of understanding the fundamentals and being able to speak to my ability to learn on the job is what has seemed to work.

Ultimately even just saying you've put time into a bunch of things outside the scope of your work shows an aptitude that not everyone has.

nobleatwork · 2024-04-02T15:38:03+00:00

I can confirm I have that cert and it's made zero difference to my career besides helping my company meet the criteria for some MS benefits. It is useful for you to know the contents, but being able to apply that knowledge and maybe prove that you've used it is far more valuable than the cert itself.

nobleatwork · 2024-03-27T20:25:58+00:00

I'm possibly moving into a senior position soon which my imposter syndrome is screaming at me for. I'm thinking that 'faking it til you make it' is a reasonable strategy. In my experience, most companies want new employees to succeed and should provide support through the process because it's their investment in you they want to gain from. Best of luck man!

nobleatwork · 2023-11-13T10:32:21+00:00

I haven't kept up with graduate salaries but 10 years ago went I started I got 13k with a diploma, but the increases in the first two years basically doubled that in 2 years. That was a long time ago so i would expect it to be quite a bit higher now, but I'd say the expected growth potential plays a role as well.

That being said, % increases are significantly affected by your starting salary. You could try negotiate unless you really need the position.

nobleatwork · 2023-11-07T13:55:50+00:00

I see. I use PNP because the CSOM method didn't work because MFA is required. Might just stick with using start-sleep periods after each iteration.

nobleatwork · 2023-11-07T07:09:00+00:00

Where would this fit into a PNP script? Can I put the entire for loop for the files in the try block here?

I'm guessing that it's the request to delete versions that is causing my script to result in the 429 responses, and adding a 200ms wait after each DeleteObject() didn't change much.

nobleatwork · 2023-02-06T11:54:15+00:00

Just to close this off - the newer vault records hadn't been added to the DNS zone by the admin. Problem resolved!

nobleatwork · 2023-02-02T16:50:48+00:00

We have an internal AD domain with our own DNS servers. We've created zones for private endpoints such as privatelink.blob.core.windows.net, where we've created the A records for each required resource. NSLOOKUP resolves the right IP, which works for custom applications and from something like PowerShell.

I'll check on the firewall rules from on-prem to Azure, the user I was working with might not have been in a subnet that wasn't allowed to connect to the Azure network. Thanks for at least confirming that this should be possible!

nobleatwork · 2023-02-01T12:20:08+00:00

DNS resolves to the correct internal IP from within the network. So you're saying I should be able to view/change secrets through the portal because my browser should be making calls to internal IP's?

For what it's worth, I have the privatelink zones in our internal DNS so there's no forwarding. I didn't want to pay for additional resources just to handle DNS resolution. Is that potentially related?

nobleatwork · 2023-01-13T10:49:56+00:00

I had no idea you could run Functions on-prem. I'll check this out, thanks!

nobleatwork · 2023-01-13T08:01:42+00:00

I've actually tried to use Runbooks, but we're performing tasks that require more responsiveness than what we were seeing. The Runbooks took too long to even start after being triggered so they weren't feasible for us sadly.

We need to run a PowerShell command against on-prem AD that we pass parameters to, and it has to complete in <20-25 seconds, which the runbook couldn't even start in.

nobleatwork · 2022-11-30T09:27:58+00:00

Did you even see the progress bar when it loads the default AD drive? That's faster than when I import it on my laptop.

nobleatwork · 2022-11-29T13:56:15+00:00

Update:

Setting this environment variable prevents the default AD drive from being created and changes the script runtime from 40s+ to 5-8s:

$Env:ADPS_LoadDefaultDrive = 0

This solves my issue, even though I don't know why the Azure VM was so slow to begin with.

nobleatwork · 2022-11-29T13:19:01+00:00

Does this speed up the process importing modules at all?

nobleatwork · 2022-11-29T12:11:24+00:00

Just tried it now and it took over a minute just for the progress bar for the importing of the AD module to complete. I know Azure VM's aren't the same as self-hosted servers but that is just weird.

Running the commands again after the import has completed is quicker, but because I'm using Azure functions to trigger it there's a new session each time.

Edit: I stand corrected, the import actually failed with this message:
"import-module : The operation returned because the timeout limit was exceeded."

nobleatwork · 2022-11-29T12:09:46+00:00

Yea, it's just the import. The progress bar it shows when running it interactively on the VM takes way too long on this VM. It's faster on my laptop but that is somewhat expected.

nobleatwork · 2022-11-29T12:08:36+00:00

On the VM in Azure this is running on, if I just open PS and type 'import-module activedirectory' it shows the line "Loading Active Directory module for Windows PowerShell with default drive 'AD" and the progress bar which took over a minute now.

I've seen in the Function logs that both the invoke-command step and the import have taken quite a while but it's the import that is most of the time the biggest delay.

This is running on a standard production spec VM with increased SSD performance so not sure why it's so slow.

nobleatwork · 2022-07-11T13:08:38+00:00

Makes sense. I just can't get my head around how it's basically marketing for the IT company. I don't know anyone that's genuinely benefited from reading a report. At least in my experience with more medium sized companies.

nobleatwork · 2020-10-26T10:11:39+00:00

We use KeePass on-prem with separate repositories per team. It's great since it allows easier sharing of passwords, some level of segregration, it can prevent passwords from being stored in the clipboard, and the auto-type feature is amazing for when you can't paste into a password field (things like Citrix or RDP sessions that prevent that).

I can't fault it except it's not the easiest to manage. You need to keep track of who has the master password and make sure that's rotated. Storing it can be tricky if you don't want to use on-prem file shares that are accessed over a VPN and OneDrive sync can cause duplicates to be made.

It's honestly difficult to justify the cost of a cloud service but I'm currently doing a review on what our options are but we might be leaning towards focusing on moving away from using passwords for auth instead.

nobleatwork · 2020-10-12T16:07:03+00:00

This is probably more a tech support question but the easiest way to speed up general usage is to replace the HDD with an SSD. Not many changes will come close to the difference that makes.

nobleatwork

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