A simple and costly mistake which can often catch Azure administrators out is the 2 states a VM can be in when powered off, it will either be in a costly Stopped state or Stopped (deallocated) state, the difference is that when a VM is shutdown using the normal operating system method it goes into a Stopped state but although shut down the resources are still allocated to it and therefore the full costs are incurred as if the VM was powered on.

This guide shows you how to initiate a shutdown and deallocate from within the guest operating system.

Learn how to connect to Office365 on port 587 and send a test email using Powershell.

Multi-cloud architectures are an ever-increasing common design in the IT world and there will likely become a point when you want to setup a fast-direct resilient VPN connection between your public cloud providers such as Azure and AWS.

This article shows you how to configure a site to site VPN between AWS and Azure utilising the Internet Key Exchange version 2 (IKEv2) for the tunnel setup.

Azure load balancers act as a highly available single point of contact that evenly distributes traffic to hosts in a backend pool, they can be utilised with health probes to ensure layer 4 traffic (TCP/UDP) is consistently and evenly distributed to healthy VM's.

This article shows you how to build an Azure load balancer then configure Network Address Translation (NAT) and Port Address Translation (PAT) rules for SSH traffic through for support or monitoring purposes, then lock it down through a network security group. This can easily be adapted for many other types of traffic.

Cloud costs can easily spiral out of control with simple administrative mistakes with temporary VM's being left on, misunderstanding storage costs, over provisioning and many more which can present serious problems when the Azure billing is invoiced. Azure budgets can be easily utilised at a subscription level to bring an element of cost control to your Azure estate, they can be scoped so they can be based on subscription, resource groups or a collection of resources and can be configured to trigger numerous types of alerts so you can address a small issue before it becomes a large issue with financial consequences.

This article shows you how to look at your monthly projected forecast, set a budget then setup a trigger to send an email based on a percentage of the budget.

Global VNet to VNet peering is when you connect different virtual networks (VNet) across Azure regions. Once the connectivity is established between the virtual networks, traffic is then privately routed through the Microsoft backbone infrastructure providing a low-latency, high-bandwidth connection between your resources meaning no public internet, gateways or encryption is required in the communication between the virtual networks.

This guide shows you how to peer a VNet in the UK South region with a VNet in East US.

Understanding exactly where your business resources and data sits within the cloud is an important part of your governance, control and your geo-compliance requirements. It can also assist with reducing latency if the regions are the closest to your end users.

This guide shows you how to implement an Azure region policy to only allowing your resources to be deployed in UK locations.

A Point-to-Site (P2S) VPN gateway lets you create a secure connection to your Azure virtual network from an individual client computer, Point-to-Site VPN connections are useful when you want to connect to your Azure VNet from remote locations such as your home or hotel. This is very similar to a traditional VPN client but rather than connecting to your office which normally has some sort of single points of failure (such as a single internet connection or 1 firewall) you are utilising the highly available Azure configuration. This guide shows you how to set up a Client VPN connection with certificates to your Azure environment using the portal.

The virtual machine serial console in the Azure portal provides access to a text-based console for Windows virtual machines. This serial connection connects to the COM1 serial port of the VM providing access to it, independent of the virtual machine's network or operating system state. Access to the serial console for the VM can be done only by using the Azure portal.

When a user is deleted from Office 365 the account is moved into a recycle bin where it is held for 30 days before being purged, this is very useful should users be accidentally deleted and can be easily recovered however this can still cause issues with Azure Active Directory Connect (AADC - used for syncing users from on-premise to Office365) when you have duplicated users/errors when trying to link up accounts for the first time when the first sync may have been done incorrectly, this guide shows you how to permanently delete the problematic deleted item therefore allowing you to redo the AADC sync as if for the first time.