Review@amazon: Microsoft Power Platform Enterprise Architecture

 This weekend i read the book "Microsoft Power Platform Enterprise Architecture"

https://www.packtpub.com/product/microsoft-power-platform-enterprise-architecture/9781800204577

Packt.com says about the book:

For forward-looking architects and decision makers who want to craft complex solutions to serve growing business needs, Microsoft Power Platform Enterprise Architecture offers an array of architectural best practices and techniques. With this book, you’ll learn how to design robust software using the tools available in the Power Platform suite and be able to integrate them seamlessly with various Microsoft 365 and Azure components. Unlike most other resources that are overwhelmingly long and unstructured, this book covers essential concepts using concise yet practical examples to help you save time.[...]

This is something i fully agree with. 

For more details please read my review at amazon :).

LinkedIn: Microsoft 365 Backup for Dummies sponsored by Veeam

 This week Veeam published this booklet on linkedin.com for download:

The booklet contains 6 chapter - the last one is a summary "Six takeaways" like always in such "for dummies" books.

From my point of view chapter 1 & 2 can be skipped - this you should really know, if running M365 (motivation for M365 backup). 

Chapter 3 is about how the loss of files can be prevented with M365 mechanisms. This is about compliance center, retention policies and labels. But only the keywords are mentioned and no deeper insights are provided.

In chapter 4 many scenarios are described, how you can loose your data on M365. Here a quote:

I think this chapter can be skipped like chapter 1 & 2. 

Chapter 5 opens with a nice term which was new to me: BaaS - Backup as a Service. Never thought about this acronym. Completely clear, that some backups in cloud are done without having purchased storage or servers on premises. Nice thing inside this chapter: a checklist about data source, data properties and some others. Really nice.

Chapter 6 comes up with the takeaways. These are really worth reading.

LinkedIn: A Guide to Data Governance - Building a roadmap for trusted data

On linkedin from "The Cyber Security Hub" shared a nice booklet about data governance:

An like always: It is only a booklet with about 25 pages - so this is not really a deep dive into this topic, but it gives you a good overview and of course a good motivation:

These include the need to governdata to maintain its quality as well as the need to protect it. This entails the prerequisite need to discover data in your organization with cataloguing, scanning, and classifying your data to support this protection.

and if this is to abstract, you should consider the following use case (and i think this use case has to be considered):

However, for AI to become effective, the data it is using must be trusted. Otherwise decision accuracy may be compromised, decisions may be delayed, or actions missed which impacts on the bottom line. Companies do not want ‘garbage in, garbage out’.

The booklet contains the sections "Requirements for governing data in a modern enterprise", "components needed for data governance", "technology needed for end-to-end data governance" and "managing master data". All sections do not provide a walk through for achieving a good data governance, but there are many questions listed, which you should answer for your company and then move forward. 

If you already have a data governance in place: This book is a good challenge for your solution. And for sure you will find some points, which are missing :)

LinkedIn Topcs: Why dataverse is for everyone...

Today i got a notification from a Microsoft colleague about the following linkedin posting:

Some weeks ago i started with PowerApps - and there this "dataverse" was mentionend as well. 

If you walk through the presentation in this linkedin post, you get an idea what this dataverse can do. I found the following picture @Microsoft learn:

And there are more details, why and how dataverse can be used: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/data-platform/data-platform-intro#why-use-dataverse

Sounds like a kind of datawarehouse centrally in the cloud. The most interesting point (like always): How to maintain this data, so that it is really usable...

Review: "Cloud Native Infrastructure with Azure" provided by Microsoft

Last week Microsoft published the following linkedin post:

On linkedin often tiny booklets are offered with around 10 up to 30 pages. But this offer from Microsoft is a book with 11 section and 289 pages.
If you are interested you can get it via this link (today this is still working, 12.2.2023): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-native-infrastructure-with-microsoft-azure/

If you are not convinced: Here the table of contents:

1. Introduction: Why Cloud Native?
2. Infrastructure as Code: Setting Up the Gateway
3. Containerizing Your Application: More Than Boxes
4. Kubernetes: The Grand Orchestrator
5. Creating a Kubernetes Cluster in Azure
6. Oberservability: Following the Breadcrumbs
7. Service Discovery and Service Mesh: Finding New Territories and Crossing Borders
8. Networking and Policy Management: Behold the Gatekeepers
9. Distributed Databases and Storage: The Central Bank
10. Getting the Message
11. Serverless
12. Conclusion

Sounds like many topics i want to read about... :)

AZ-900 achieved: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals

Yesterday evening i passed Microsofts AZ-900 exam:

Taking the exam on site was no option because of COVID-19, so tried the first time the online option. Nice thing: Many schedules and i chose 20:45. 

As examinee you have to start your online session half an hour earlier and this time you really need for the onboarding: 

1. Download the software to your PC and do some checks (audio, network, ...)
   This is an .exe - so only windows PCs are possible
2. Install the app "Pearson VUE" on your smartphone to provide
1. selfie
2. passport/driver license/...
3. photos of your room
3. Talking to an instructor
   You are not allowed to wear a headset - even a watch is not allowed

 After that the exam is about 40 questions in 45 minutes - quite fair.

 The questions are about these topics:

• Describe cloud concepts (20-25%)
• Describe core Azure services (15-20%)
• Describe core solutions and management tools on Azure (10-15%)
• Describe general security and network security features (10-15%)
• Describe identity, governance, privacy, and compliance features (15-20%)
• Describe Azure cost management and Service Level Agreements (10-15%)

More information can be found here: https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE3VwUY

If you want to do this exam, start here:

Review: Mastering Azure Machine Learning

Last week i stumbled upon this book and this weekend there was enough time to walk through it:

 

The book contains 14 chapters on 409 pages - but due to the layout, i think it can fit on 200 pages on a book with "default rendering".
The book is in addition divided in 4 sections: 1 - Azure Machine Learning / 2 - Experimentation and Data Preperation / 3 - Training Machine Learning Models / 4 Optimization and Deployment of Machine Learning Models

Chapter 1 is named "Building an end-to-end machine learning pipeline in Azure". I struggled with this title, but in the first section it is explained: "You can see it as an overview of the book". The subsections cover data exploration, data preparation, choosing the model, optimization and deploying/operating models. The chapter is a teaser with many graphs, examples, stragetgies - a fast end-to-end walk through.

"Choosing a machine learning service in Azure" is the title of the second chapter. Here is everything discussed about ML vs. AI and the Azure services, which provide these techniques (e.g. Data Science Virtual Machine, Azure Batch, Azure Databricks, Azure Functions, Azure IoT Edge, Custom Vision, Azure Machine Learning Designer, Machine Learning Studio,  ...). This chapter contains many screenshots and code snippets - from my point of view to much at this point.

In chapter three (Data experimentation and visualization using Azure) it is shown how to setup your environment via Azure CLI, so that you are able to perform these steps again and again for new projects. In addition it is presented how to run everything on the local machine and track the metrics and artifacts to the Azure workspace. After that visualization is explained including code examples. Pairplots, principal component analysis, quadratic discriminant analysis, stochastic neighbor embedding - Really cool.

Chapter 4 is about "ELT, data preparation and feature extraction". Here are some nice commands with Azure CLI provided: How to batch upload data up to the Azure storage accounts and attaching them to the ML workspace. And how to access this data via python.

Chapter 5 "Azure Machine Learning Pipelines" is about to make the content of chapter 4 reusable. I think nothing to note here - a nice reference for the python code which is needed.

"Advanced feature extraction with NLP" is chapter 6. NLP = natural language processing. Nothing more to say here.

The chaper 7 to 9 are about training machine learning models. I think i will not describe each of them. But here a short summary: It starts with decision trees as explanation and then does a deep dive in how to use LightGBM including the python code. Then the same for convolutional neural networks (CNN): explanation/motivation + coding. This is followed by the description of Azure Hyperdrive: tuning and optimizing the machine learning process. The concept of hyperparameters (e.g. number of neurons in a layer)  is introduced and how to choose them with grid sampling on an elastic cloud infrastructure. And last but not least: it is described how Azure provides "a service to users that automatically preprocesses your data, selects an ML model, and trains and optimizes the model to optimally fit your training data [...]".

Chapter 10 is about using clusters. This is a nice introduction about partitioning data, workloads and synchronizing worker nodes.
"Building a recommendation engine in Azure" is the title of chapter 11. Just some catchwords from the content: non-personalized, contentbased, rating-based, hybrid recommendations. After this chapter you will know, why amazons recommendations are like they are ;-)

In chapter 11 & 12 it is described, how to register, deploy and operate a recommendation engine or machine learning model up to MLOps.

The book closes with chapter 14 "What's next?". Most important point like everywhere: Automation...

Summary: I liked this book very much, because every topic starts with an excellent introduction and there are many code examples, so that you can us this book as reference as well. The basic understanding of the author is best described with the following quote:
"the most important tasks [are]: Data acquisition,  Data cleansing, Data labeling, Selecting an error metric. We don't want to blame anyone, but some machine learning engineers love to simply skip these topics and dive right into the fun parts, namely feature engineering, model selection, parameterization, and tuning." 

That hits the bull's eye.

(The review can be found on amazon as well)

Microsoft Teams: How to prevent Teams echo bot from constantly disturbing phone conferences

Some people have found a new hobby: Blowing up Teams meetings.

How do they achieve this?

Very easy. If you are inside a Teams meeting just go to "add members" and type in "Teams echo":

The annoying things about this: 

• This can be done by anyone who was invited and is not limited to your organzation
• On Linux you are not able to invite the Team Echo
• The lobby does not work for Teams Echo - that means he will join you and you have to chance to get rid of that.
• You can not mute Teams Echo
  

Then click on this and you will get the following experience:

 

There is one hint i found:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/284720/can-we-block-or-remove-39teams-echo39-bot-from-ent.html 

Microsoft itself does not really understand the issue:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/teams-echo-entering-into-meetings/3418d131-8619-4785-9ab4-0aed6acbb8c2?auth=1

But this does not work, because you do not find a "Teams echo app" inside https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/policies/manage-apps 

The problem is known:

If you know how to prevent this: Please leave a comment...

Microsoft Ignite: Book of News - March 2021 (Azure et al.)

If you are interested about the new features of Azure, Office 365 and other Microsoft topics, read the Book of New:

https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-march-2021-book-of-news/

 

The table of contents shows the following chapters:

In my opinion chapter 5.4 is one of the most important ones:

https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-march-2021-book-of-news/#a-541-new-security-compliance-and-identity-certifications-and-content-aim-to-close-security-skills-gap

To help address the security skills gap, Microsoft has added four new Security, Compliance and Identity certifications with supporting training and has made several updates to the Microsoft Security Technical Content Library. These certifications and content are intended to help cybersecurity professionals increase their skilling knowledge and keep up with complex cybersecurity threats.

These new certifications with supporting training are tailored to specific roles and needs, regardless of where customers are in their skilling journey:

• The Microsoft Certified: Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals certification will help individuals get familiar with the fundamentals of security, compliance and identity across cloud-based and related Microsoft services.
• The Microsoft Certified: Information Protection Administrator Associate certification focuses on planning and implementing controls that meet organizational compliance needs.
• The Microsoft Certified: Security Operations Analyst Associate certification helps security operational professionals design threat protection and response systems.
• The Microsoft Certified: Identity and Access Administrator Associate certification helps individuals design, implement and operate an organization’s identity and access management systems by using Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).

In addition, the Microsoft Security Technical Content Library contains new technical content and resources.

 

Office 365: Enable mail forwarding to external email domains...

For a society i do some IT administration things - and now something really new: a Office 365 tenant.

First thing was to enable mail forwarding to external email accounts. Sounds easy - hmmm not really.

Configuring the forwarding in outlook.com is quite easy:

But this does not work:

Remote Server returned '550 5.7.520 Access denied, Your organization does not allow external forwarding. Please contact your administrator for further assistance. AS(7555)'

To change this behaviour you have to go to the admin settings:

https://protection.office.com/antispam

Now click policy:

Then choose Anti-spam:

And the chose the third entry and click "edit policy":

And the last step: Change Automatic forwarding to "on"

After you click save the email will now forwarded to external domains...

Mission accomplished: OpenHack: Migrating Microsoft Workloads to Azure

 After three days of hard work i got my first OPENHACK badge:

Issued by Microsoft OpenHack

Authorized by Microsoft

Here the details from Microsoft:

Earners of the OpenHack: Migration badge understand how to execute an end-to-end migration through optimization. They have shown that they can utilize Azure Migrate to migrate virtual machines to Microsoft Azure and can modernize legacy applications by migrating to PaaS services such as Azure SQL Database and Azure App Service. They have also have a foundational understanding of Azure identity, including hybrid identity with Azure AD and how to leverage Azure RBAC to govern and secure workloads.

It was really a great challenge to discuss and implement all the goals. Thanks to the excellent coaches and for providing the infrastructure!

Review: Running Containers in Production for dummies

 Last evening i read the following booklet:

Here my review:

Chapter one gives within 7 pages an excellent introduction into "Containers & Orchestration Platforms". From Kubernetes over Openshift/Docker Swarm up to Amazon EKS - many services are described. In my opinion Azure AKS is missing, but it is clear, that every hyperscaler will provide you its managed Kubernetes environment. At the end even Apache Mesos is listed - which is out of scope for the most of us. 

Building & Deploying Containers is the headline of chapter 2 and a brief, solid description of these topics is given. If you want to know what all the buzzwords like CI/CD/CS, Pipelines, Container Registries are about: Read that chapter and you have a good starting point.

Nearly 33% of the book(let) is abount Monitoring Containers (chapter 3). This points in to the right directions. You have to know what your containers are doing and what you have to change with continuous delivery and continuous deployment. If you are running tens or hundreds of containers, the monitoring has to be  automatic as well - or you are lost. "A best practice for using containers is to isolate workloads by running only a single process per container.  Placing a monitoring agent — which amounts to a second process or service — in each container to get visibility risks destroying a key value of containers: simplicity." - So building up a monitoring is not such easy, as is was on full-stack servers...

Chapter 4 is about Security. This focuses on the following topics: Implementing container limits against resource abuse, how to avoid outdated container images, management of secrets and image authenticity.

The last chapter closes with "Ten Container Takeaways".

 

Within 43 pages a really nice starting point to learn about the world of docker and container orchestration.

review at amazon: Azure for Architects

This weekend i read "Azure for Architects - Implementing cloud design, DevOps, containers, IoT and serverless solutions on your public cloud".

After i had some trouble to publish my review on amazon.de and i put in onto my blog (take a look here), i wrote a smaller review only about 2 chapters. And this worked...

One statement i liked, was:

This is not only true for security, but sometimes it is important to state the obvious.

If you are interested, take a look at my review at amazon.de (like all my reviews: written in german ;-).

Microsoft Azure: Adding user requires more work as expected

Just to try some things in Microsoft Azure i wanted to add an additional user to my test account. But this was not so easy:

Go to "Azure Active Directory" and "Users":

 

 But then:

I thought this is not really a problem, because openesb.eu is my domain, so let's try to verify this one:

The problem is, that i am not able to change this settings. So i tried, if i am lucky, but:

So only way to add users in such a minimal setup, is to add accounts from live.com etc..

Microsoft Azure: How to use waagent (Microsoft Azure Linux Agent)

After installation waagent on my ubunu server, i tried to use this tool.
First guess was to read the manpages, but there is no entry for waagent:

root@ubuntuserver:~# man waagent
No manual entry for waagent
See 'man 7 undocumented' for help when manual pages are not available.

So for documentation you have to visit the Microsoft Azure portal:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/extensions/agent-linux

Here are some commands i tried:

root@ubuntuserver:~# waagent -show-configuration
AutoUpdate.Enabled = True
AutoUpdate.GAFamily = Prod
Autoupdate.Frequency = 3600
CGroups.EnforceLimits = False
CGroups.Excluded = customscript,runcommand
DVD.MountPoint = /mnt/cdrom/secure
DetectScvmmEnv = False
EnableOverProvisioning = True
Extension.LogDir = /var/log/azure
Extensions.Enabled = True
HttpProxy.Host = None
HttpProxy.Port = None
Lib.Dir = /var/lib/waagent
Logs.Verbose = False
OS.AllowHTTP = False
OS.CheckRdmaDriver = False
OS.EnableFIPS = False
OS.EnableFirewall = True
OS.EnableRDMA = False
OS.HomeDir = /home
OS.OpensslPath = /usr/bin/openssl
OS.PasswordPath = /etc/shadow
OS.RootDeviceScsiTimeout = 300
OS.SshClientAliveInterval = 180
OS.SshDir = /etc/ssh
OS.SudoersDir = /etc/sudoers.d
OS.UpdateRdmaDriver = False
Pid.File = /var/run/waagent.pid
Provisioning.AllowResetSysUser = False
Provisioning.DecodeCustomData = False
Provisioning.DeleteRootPassword = True
Provisioning.Enabled = False
Provisioning.ExecuteCustomData = False
Provisioning.MonitorHostName = False
Provisioning.PasswordCryptId = 6
Provisioning.PasswordCryptSaltLength = 10
Provisioning.RegenerateSshHostKeyPair = False
Provisioning.SshHostKeyPairType = rsa
Provisioning.UseCloudInit = True
ResourceDisk.EnableSwap = False
ResourceDisk.Filesystem = ext4
ResourceDisk.Format = False
ResourceDisk.MountOptions = None
ResourceDisk.MountPoint = /mnt
ResourceDisk.SwapSizeMB = 0

or list all commands:

root@ubuntuserver:~# waagent -help
usage: /usr/sbin/waagent [-verbose] [-force] [-help] -configuration-path:-deprovision[+user]|-register-service|-version|-daemon|-start|-run-exthandlers|-show-configuration]

review: architecting microsoft azure solutions

Last week i read the exam ref "architecting microsoft azure solutions"

The book cover states

Designed for architects and other cloud professionals ready to advance their status, Exam Ref focuses on the critical thinking and decision-making acumen needed for success at the MCSA level.

The book "Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions" comes with 320 pages and 6 chapters. The claim of the book: "This book teaches you how to design and architect secure, highly-available, performant, monitored and resilient solutions on Azure".

The first chapter is "Design compute infrastructure". The beginning is clearly structured: Fault Domains, Availabilty Sets and Update Domains. Unfortunately, when listing the VM types, thera are various letters shown, but an explanation of the abbreviations of that letters is missing.
The sub-chapter Migration contains only many URLs. Helpful examples are not provided. The next subchapters serverless computing and microservices are not worth reading. It is not at all clear which requirements have to be met in order to build an application serverless or in a container. But there are many comparisons when serverless computing fits better than microservices.
The subchapter "Design Web Applications" loses itself in general considerations regarding availability and description of REST.
The biggest problem with Chapter 1 is that there is a lack of examples that allow the topics to be played through once. Also missing at the end of the chapter of the typical question catalog, with which one could prepare for an exam.

After chapter 1 I did not want to read any further - that would have been a mistake. For all who buy this book: skip Chapter 1!

The chapters 2 and 3 (Storage & Networking) are really good. They provide brief explanations and for every use case detailed instructions for the Azure command line or the portal including screenshots are presented. Both chapters are very well written and give an overview of the respective topics. Here is a list for the storage chapter: Blob Storage, Azure Files, Azure Disks, Azure Data Catalog, Azure Data Factory, SQL Data Warehouse, Data Lake Analytics, Analysis Services, HDInsight, SQL Database, SQL Server Stretch Database, MySQL, Postgresql , Redis Cache, Data Lake, Azure Search, Azure Time Series, Comsmos DB, MongoDB. There is no topic left open. The same applies to the network chapter.

Chapter 4 "Design security and identity solutions" is very well structured. All terms are introduced at the beginning and then various options with sequence diagrams are played through. Subsequently, the appropriate services such as Azure Active Directoy are introduced. Very nice here is the representation of the integration possibilities with ASP.Net. Otherwise, topics such as integration with Office 365 (calendar access) or key management in the cloud are highlighted.

The fifth chapter is, in my view, more an outlook: "Design solutions by using platform service". Here are the topics like AI, IoT, streaming treated. Here you can take with you, what is possible and what building blocks Azure provides.

The final chapter "Design for operations" deals with cross-functionalities such as monitoring and alarming. A wrapper for the following services will be delivered: Azure Monitor, Azure Advisor, Azure Service Health, Azure Activity Log, Azure Dashboard, Azure Metrics Explorer, Azure Alerts, Azure Log Analytics, Azure Application Insights. Almost every topic has an example including configuration via the Azure portal.

Conclusion: Except for the first chapter a very good book to get started. It is not good for exam preparation, as no questionnaires / multiple choice lists are included. It is a pity that the subchapters have no numbering and you have to navigate with the font sizes. Nevertheless, you will hardly find a faster entry into Azure.

Microsoft Azure: Administration of Virtual Networks / Diagrams

After creating my first vm on Microsoft Azure, i took a closer look at the dashboard - especially at the menu bar of the dashboard:

First point of interest was the menu item "virtual networks", which led me to the following overview:

Hm. A little bit strange, that the virtual networks just show up with a list of the resource groups (you have to create one - otherwise you are not able to launch a virtual machine). But after doing a click on the resource group, a nice overview to my virtual network was provided:

The menu bar in the middle contains the entry "diagram". So let's see, what kind of diagram Azure will present:

The green item represents the network interface card. The other three items stand for the virtual machine, the network security group and public ip address. The next three screenshots show the details you can obtain, by clicking on these icons:

Microsoft Azure: Automation with AZ cli on linux

One thing which is really important for using cloud infrastructures is to automate your tasks like starting virtual machines, creating storage, ...

It is clear, that there is a CLI for Windows, but is there also a CLI on Linux provided by Microsoft?
And really there is one:

https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/cli/azure/?view=azure-cli-latest

The installation procedure can be found here.

# apt-get install apt-transport-https lsb-release software-properties-common dirmngr -y
Paketlisten werden gelesen... Fertig
Abhängigkeitsbaum wird aufgebaut.       
Statusinformationen werden eingelesen.... Fertig
lsb-release ist schon die neueste Version (9.20170808ubuntu1).
dirmngr ist schon die neueste Version (2.2.4-1ubuntu1.2).
Die folgenden Pakete werden aktualisiert (Upgrade):
  apt-transport-https python3-software-properties software-properties-common software-properties-gtk
4 aktualisiert, 0 neu installiert, 0 zu entfernen und 173 nicht aktualisiert.
Es müssen 87,2 kB an Archiven heruntergeladen werden.
Nach dieser Operation werden 2.048 B Plattenplatz zusätzlich benutzt.
Holen:1 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/universe amd64 apt-transport-https all 1.6.8 [1.692 B]
Holen:2 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/main amd64 software-properties-common all 0.96.24.32.7 [9.908 B]
Holen:3 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/main amd64 software-properties-gtk all 0.96.24.32.7 [53,6 kB]
Holen:4 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/main amd64 python3-software-properties all 0.96.24.32.7 [22,0 kB]
Es wurden 87,2 kB in 0 s geholt (427 kB/s).             
(Lese Datenbank ... 421429 Dateien und Verzeichnisse sind derzeit installiert.)
Vorbereitung zum Entpacken von .../apt-transport-https_1.6.8_all.deb ...
Entpacken von apt-transport-https (1.6.8) über (1.6.6ubuntu0.1) ...
Vorbereitung zum Entpacken von .../software-properties-common_0.96.24.32.7_all.deb ...
Entpacken von software-properties-common (0.96.24.32.7) über (0.96.24.32.6) ...
Vorbereitung zum Entpacken von .../software-properties-gtk_0.96.24.32.7_all.deb ...
Entpacken von software-properties-gtk (0.96.24.32.7) über (0.96.24.32.6) ...
Vorbereitung zum Entpacken von .../python3-software-properties_0.96.24.32.7_all.deb ...
Entpacken von python3-software-properties (0.96.24.32.7) über (0.96.24.32.6) ...
apt-transport-https (1.6.8) wird eingerichtet ...

# echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/azure-cli/ $AZ_REPO main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/azure-cli.list

# apt-key --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/Microsoft.gpg adv \
>      --keyserver packages.microsoft.com \
>      --recv-keys BC528686B50D79E339D3721CEB3E94ADBE1229CF
Executing: /tmp/apt-key-gpghome.D49hIjQpQ5/gpg.1.sh --keyserver packages.microsoft.com --recv-keys BC528686B50D79E339D3721CEB3E94ADBE1229CF
gpg: Schlüssel EB3E94ADBE1229CF: Öffentlicher Schlüssel "Microsoft (Release signing) " importiert
gpg: Anzahl insgesamt bearbeiteter Schlüssel: 1
gpg:               importiert: 1

# apt-get update && apt-get install azure-cli
Die folgenden NEUEN Pakete werden installiert:
  azure-cli
0 aktualisiert, 1 neu installiert, 0 zu entfernen und 173 nicht aktualisiert.
Es müssen 43,9 MB an Archiven heruntergeladen werden.
Nach dieser Operation werden 398 MB Plattenplatz zusätzlich benutzt.
Holen:1 https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/azure-cli bionic/main amd64 azure-cli all 2.0.56-1~bionic [43,9 MB]
Es wurden 43,9 MB in 7 s geholt (5.905 kB/s).                                                                                                                               
Vormals nicht ausgewähltes Paket azure-cli wird gewählt.
(Lese Datenbank ... 421429 Dateien und Verzeichnisse sind derzeit installiert.)
Vorbereitung zum Entpacken von .../azure-cli_2.0.56-1~bionic_all.deb ...
Entpacken von azure-cli (2.0.56-1~bionic) ...
azure-cli (2.0.56-1~bionic) wird eingerichtet ...

After that i tried to login:

schroff@zerberus:~$ az login
Note, we have launched a browser for you to login. For old experience with device code, use "az login --use-device-code"
You have logged in. Now let us find all the subscriptions to which you have access...
[
  {
    "cloudName": "AzureCloud",
    "id": "yyyy-xxxxx",
    "isDefault": true,
    "name": "Free Trial",
    "state": "Enabled",
    "tenantId": "yyyyy-xxxxxx",
    "user": {
      "name": "d.schroff@gmx.de",
      "type": "user"
    }
  }
]

Within the login process i was redirected to my browser:

and after choosing my account the browser showed up with this message:

And then you can issue commands like:

schroff@zerberus:~$ az vm list
[
  {
    "additionalCapabilities": null,
    "availabilitySet": null,
    "diagnosticsProfile": {
      "bootDiagnostics": {
        "enabled": true,

Microsoft Azure / Ubuntu: Installation waagent

If you want to build your own Linux images for Microsoft Azure, you have to use waagent. So i created a virtual machine on my local host with ubuntu server.
The installation of waagent is easy, if you know, that the package is not called waagent on ubunut but walinuxagent:

# apt install walinuxagent
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  walinuxagent
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 24 not upgraded.
Need to get 170 kB of archives.
After this operation, 1,075 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/main amd64 walinuxagent amd64 2.2.32-0ubuntu1~18.04.1 [170 kB]
Fetched 170 kB in 0s (400 kB/s)  
Selecting previously unselected package walinuxagent.
(Reading database ... 66707 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../walinuxagent_2.2.32-0ubuntu1~18.04.1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking walinuxagent (2.2.32-0ubuntu1~18.04.1) ...
Processing triggers for ureadahead (0.100.0-20) ...
Setting up walinuxagent (2.2.32-0ubuntu1~18.04.1) ...
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/walinuxagent.service → /lib/systemd/system/walinuxagent.service.
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/ephemeral-disk-warning.service → /lib/systemd/system/ephemeral-disk-warning.service.
Processing triggers for ureadahead (0.100.0-20) ...
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.130ubuntu3.6) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-45-generic

To get more information wether waagent is supported for your preferred distribution just check this github page: https://github.com/Azure/WALinuxAgent

Microsoft Azure: Where to find the logs

When working with Microsoft Azure, you want to be able to review all actions taken inside your cloud. Therefore you have to go to "monitor":

Inside the subwindow just select "activity log" and edit the filters to your needs (i added "successful):

Some of the activities can be further drilled down. For example the creation of a virtual machine lists many subactivities like "created or updated public ip address":