In a company’s journey to the cloud, one of the topics that is important to sort out early is identity management. To do anything meaningful with Google Cloud, employees need to be able to sign in to the Cloud Console – but manually creating user accounts for each employee is rarely a good idea.
When you automatically provision VM instances, you might need to know when the initialization has completed so that you can connect to the VM or initiate the next deployment steps. There are a few ways to determine when a VM is ready, so let us explore what these are.
Azure DevOps has come a long way since its humble beginnings as Visual Studio Team System. Especially its CI/CD component, Azure Pipelines, has made some major leaps over the past years and is now actually quite nice to use.
Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager (RDCMan) is gone, it and took the Google Cloud IAP for Remote Desktop plugin with it. But now there is IAP Desktop to supersede both of them.
Cloud computing is all about being able to dynamically scale, provision, and decommission resources or entire environments on demand. But the idea that infrastructure is dynamic clashes with some assumptions Active Directory is built around, and creates a challenge if you run Windows workloads in the cloud.
On Google Cloud, a Linux instance boots in about 30 seconds while a Windows instance takes a full 2 minutes to turn up – why is Windows so much slower?
Twenty years have passed since Microsoft released Windows 2000 and introduced Active Directory to the market. The excitement about Active Directory has certainly ebbed since then – but at the same time, it is difficult to overstate the impact that Active Directory has had on the IT market.
If you have been an MSDN, TechNet, or Action Pack subscriber in the past, you probably remember the binders full of discs that Microsoft used to ship.
If your plan is to develop a tool or desktop app instead of a server-side application, the benefits of application default credentials are less obvious and reusing the user’s personal gcloud credentials instead might seem attractive. But there are some pitfalls.
gcloud manages two sets of credentials, your personal credentials and application default credentials. Having two separate credentials might seem redundant and can cause surprises the first time you use one of the Google Cloud client libraries. But the two credentials serve different purposes.