It’s been one of those weeks. There’s no major projects looming but yet there’s a lot of what would be called BAU “Business As Usual” tasks that need attention.  BAU tasks are not the most thrilling but never the less they need to be done I suppose.

So. I’m here at my desk. I’m signed in, I’ve the Bose QC35’s on my ears, the Ceol FM energetic stream is playing and I’m ready to go.

1.  Email department about Azure subscription renewal.  They have several reserved instances and an Email thread with the sales partner has finally answered the questions that I had so I’m now in a position to make informed decisions so that they can renew their reserved instances and decide on their monetary commit for the next twelve months.  ON a separate note, I created that infrastructure in Azure exactly a year ago and it has had 100% up time.
2. An integration project that has been ticking away needs attention.  The people who’s system I’m integrating have no technical problems in particular but I can tell from their responses that they are worrying so I think I’m going to arrange to meet them for a coffee later just to explain what’s happening and to put them at ease.
3. I’ve been working on a Shiboleth IdP integration project for the last while but I inherited code and instead of objectively looking at it I just dived right in and started trying to make progress.  a month in, I’ve had to take a step back and look at what I’m trying to do.  The previous developer had tried to reinvent the wheel by manually writing the SAML using an XML writer. That’s fine for login. It’s not ideal but it will work.  But for logout, there’s just too much XML to write and the requirements for logout are tooo complex.  For example, although you might get the SAML write for sending the logout request, the SPNameQualifier meta data that’s needed is generated by a HTTP request that originates from the IdP.  If you query the SP for that directly, it won’t expose the data so it’s very hard to find out what should be written by investigating a working system.  Therefore, I’ve found a library that handles the Shiboleth conversation without needing to write all of the SAML by hand.  I’ve done some work on this on Tuesday but I will need to spent another few hours on this today.
4. There’s a career progression task on my list. I’ll explain what that will involve later but that’s another hour gone.

There you have it. It’s going to be a full day.

Please send coffee.

Oh I’m also studying Azure enterprise architecture on Linkedin Learning at the moment. I’ve completed several projects in this area and I’ve attended at least a dozen courses and workshops in the area of Azure as well but cloud platforms are constantly evolving.   This particular course uses templates for everything which is a really good idea.  Using the web UI is inefficient. So far the infrastructure I’ve been working on is small enough.  Forty to fifty servers at most but as I start to look into ASR “Azure Site Recovery” and as high availability workloads are pushed to the cloud, I need to be more confident when deploying high availability resources out in bulk and verifying that configuration remains consistent through using templates and desired state configuration powershell scripts.

That’s what’s in my head this morning. Your welcome to it.