As G Suite continues to grow, so has the demand for a mobile workforce. Given the current COVID pandemic, Observian wanted to share some tips for enabling your workforce from home. One of the least utilized apps in G Suite is Hangouts Chat. This lesser known tool combines the functionality of instant messaging and file sharing capabilities of Google Drive. The combination provides a streamlined collaboration environment wherever your employees work. Hangouts Chat can help you support video calls, chat communications and file sharing from a central location within minutes.

Tags: Tools, Google Cloud, G Suite

With more public and private clouds popping up, it can be difficult for enterprises of any size to determine which cloud is best for them.  As the technology develops, each cloud provider boasts improved functionality and new integrations to make management and monitoring easier and provide users more flexibility in network and infrastructure configurations.  While AWS was the first cloud environment launched and Azure has the backing of industry powerhouse Microsoft, Google is finding its niche. 

Tags: GCP, Networking, Security

I took (and failed) the GCP Professional Collaboration Engineer certification earlier this week. I want to share my experience so that others can avoid the same mistakes. I have been administering over G Suite domains for two years and have obtained several Google certifications, most recently the GCP Professional Cloud Architect. I am sharing my past experiences to give context to the mistakes when preparing for the exam.

Tags: GCP, Google Cloud, G Suite

 

Tags: GCP, G Suite

This is what the .NET community needed to fully embrace GCP

Yesterday at Google Next, they announced something I've been wanting for a long time. As a google partner, sometimes I get to hear about things when they're in alpha and this was one of them. Serverless containers is the ultimate awesome in my mind, especially for webapps and APIs, because everyone knows the biggest headache for containers is orchestration. Well this announcement kinda abrogates the need for orchestration at all. If these things auto-scale then I don't have to manage a K8s cluster at all. I mean, yeah for internal services there is some significant networking work to do, but DUDE. Auto-scaling CONTAINERS that are SERVERLESS. Can life better? I submit that it CANNOT!

Tags: GCP, .Net Core, CloudRun

Recently I had the opportunity to engage in a Q&A session with Peter Baumbach from AlertLogic.  

Tags: Security, Containers, Alert Logic

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

 

Tags: GCP, Networking, VPC

When creating an AWS EC2 instance, there is a User Data section where you can include scripts that will be run immediately upon instance creation. I was attempting to use AWS CloudFormation to define the infrastructure of my current project and ran into the issue of how to include the User Data section in the CloudFormation JSON definition.

Tags: AWS, CloudFormation, DevOps

Docker Deployment

DevOps is harder than it sounds

If you're like me, when you learned about containers, you got SUPER excited. There is something about wrapping up your code in a nice little package where it has everything it needs to run in a happy little space where it's nice and warm. BUT; how'm I supposed to get my happy warm little container out into the real world where it can actually do some good? This is harder question to answer.

Tags: AWS, DevOps, Docker

A CloudFormation script to get a docker instance of pi-hole running in your AWS account

What is pi-hole?

Tags: AWS, CloudFormation, Docker