When the time came to relaunch my blog I spent a fair amount of time researching options. I wanted something that worked well for me that didn’t require too much infrastructure. I also wanted to keep costs fairly low and not take on a large monthly recurring cost.

• Ideally, I wanted static content that I could host in an Azure Storage account or some sort of static website hosting.
• I wanted something that felt comfortable for me. I spend a fair amount of time authoring articles in Markdown and it has really grown on me over the past few years.
• An application with a fair amount of plugin and theme options, I don’t really want to get involved in creating a custom template. A reasonably sized community was a plus.

I am happy to announce the return of the Hammer Time Tech Blog! I know you couldn’t wait for this to happen..

Recently I’ve been wanting to get back into blogging from a more technical perspective with some how to’s and lessons learned over my career. Previously the blog was hosted on Medium but that didn’t feel like the right… medium (harhar?) for what I’d like to be talking about these days.

There will still be some opinion posts and articles with things that I have on my mind. But in addition to that there will be more technical articles where I explain how I solved a problem or post some script snippets that helped me out. I also hope to further add to my GitHub which is sorely lacking in original content.

The first article coming soon will be how to use Azure DevOps to create a full CI/CD pipeline for publishing a Hexo site to Azure Storage using the new static website hosting feature. I’ll also explain my reasoning for moving to Hexo when there’s no shortage of blogging applications out there on the Internet.

I am really looking forward to sharing more knowledge in 2019!

I’ve been hearing about the eminent demise of on-premise workloads and “Private Clouds” ever since the Public Cloud became a thing. Most recently I’ve seen quite a few articles about how their days are numbered.

I disagree.

In my role as a Product Architect for Microsoft Hyper-V and Cloud Platform my team and I deal with traditional Virtualization but we also dabble quite a bit in Public Clouds, mostly Microsoft Azure. We try and make sure we utilize every service that we can to provide a streamlined product offering for our customers. So, I live in these worlds and often advise customers and architect environments that take advantage of both worlds. I’ll be speaking primarily from the Microsoft side of things.

First off private clouds still provide significant value and lower your overall IT spend. Your benefits include being able to fully manage your entire stack from the networking on up. You’re in control of the compliance and how everything operates. There are still quite a few reasons to use traditional virtualization for things like legacy workloads and most of all control. You also have full access to all the capacity you purchased up front, and when you aren’t using that capacity it’s available to you right away. It certainly is not hyperscale, but it is guaranteed capacity within your data center.

Public clouds are advancing at a rapid pace, in some cases new features are added hourly. They are starting to become MUCH friendlier to compliance requirements like PCI, FedRAMP and many others. And as a result, it is becoming more appealing to put your workload in Azure or AWS.

When deploying Windows Server as a hypervisor host for virtual machine workloads there are a variety of best practices that should be put in place. Running Hyper-V on Windows has special considerations when it comes to workload. For example, Virtual Machine Queues and Hyper-V Specific hotfixes. This is blog entry serves as an overview of important checks you should ensure are in place. General Host Considerations Starting with your base operating system you should strongly consider Windows Server Core.

Recently I got into an argument in some Facebook comments (yea I know) regarding Online Communities. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently with everything going on in this country.

It’s the Internet. You get a group of people together under a shroud of anonymity and guess what happens? Stupidity that shouldn’t be taken seriously.

I’ve been involved in a variety of online communities and I’ve even been at the helm of a few. I know that they can be fickle beasts with all sorts of crazy personalities, trolls, and debate. It can be very easy to shrug off comments or threats made by someone on the Internet “It’s the Internet. You get a group of people together under a shroud of anonymity and guess what happens? Stupidity that shouldn’t be taken seriously.” but having been the target of online harassment over the years I can tell you that it isn’t anything that should be shrugged off. I’ve even seen toxic people be celebrated and rewarded time and time again when they do nothing but blurt out vitriol and racism. I’ve seen those same people bring other people in to their cause and have those people do the harassment for them, its the modern day version of a henchman.

I say that it should be taken very seriously for a number of reasons.

If you aren’t an Engineer or don’t work in the tech industry the term “Net Neutrality” may not mean a whole lot to you. So I’ll start with a brief explanation of exactly what it is and why you should care about it.

Net neutrality for all intents and purposes is a means to ensure that the Internet is treated as a Utility. So what does that mean to you exactly?

Imagine if the electric company decided that they would reduce the voltage provided to your house. Instead of getting the promised 110v you were now getting 90v. Likely, this means that most of your appliances wouldn’t work and the things that did would would be unreliable at best. Net Neutrality makes sure that the same thing doesn’t happen with your Internet. Meaning that, say you were watching too much Netflix and the provider didn’t like that — They could simply “throttle” it and make it so your Netflix would be unreliable and constantly buffering. Funny enough, that actually happened.

The government has already made strides to insure that the Internet is treated as a utility, meaning that theoretically the above scenario isn’t possible anymore.

Or is it?