Using the Pure Storage PowerShellSDK2 - Part 1 - Connecting to FlashArray

Welcome to our blog series on using the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK2. In this series, we will provide you with practical insights and examples on how to harness the power of the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK2 to enhance your storage management capabilities. Throughout this series, we will cover a wide range of topics, including performance data gathering, snapshot management, performance bottleneck identification, and resource management within your FlashArray and Cloud Block Store.

Writing a Hello World Go Container Web Application

In this blog post, I will show you how to build a hello world container-based web application in the go programming language. The reason I want to do this is because I need a very small container image to do some testing in Kubernetes. I’ll also highlight some of the pitfalls I ran into to hopefully have you some time in your learnings. Let’s build and test it locally first Before you build a container-based application, you need an application.

New Pluralsight Course – Securing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Clusters

My new course “Securing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Clusters”, co-authored with my good friend and colleague Ben E. Weissman, is now available on Pluralsight here! If you want to learn about the course, check out the trailer here, or if you’re going to dive right in, check it out here! This course completes the learning path, Managing and Orchestrating Containers with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), that Ben and I built together.

Working With Tags in FlashArray using PowerShell

Introduction Purity is the operating environment that runs Pure Storage products like FlashArray and Cloud Block Store. Starting in Purity 6.0, you can assign tags to objects. This post shows you how to perform some basic tagging operations for volumes. What’s a Tag and Why Do I Care? A tag is a key/value pair that can be attached to an object in FlashArray, like a volume or a snapshot. Using tags enables you to attach additional metadata to objects for classification, sorting, and searching.

Running SQL Server on Apple Silicon - Updated

Last week I purchased a shiny new MacBook Air with an M2 processor. After I got all the standard stuff up and running, I set out to learn how to run SQL Server containers on this new hardware. This post shows you how to run SQL Server on Apple Silicon using colima. Colima is a container runtime that runs a Linux VM on your Mac. This Linux VM runs using the Virtualization framework hypervisor native in MacOS.

Monitoring with the Pure Storage FlashArray OpenMetrics Exporter

This post introduces you to the Pure Storage FlashArray OpenMetrics Exporter. It shows you how to get started quickly using Docker Compose so you can monitor your Pure Storage FlashArray environment. I implemented this in Docker Compose since that handles all the implementation and configuration steps for you. It specifically configures Prometheus’ data source and a Grafana dashboard for monitoring. Tip: If you’re building a persistent monitoring solution, I suggest using a dedicated Linux server running Docker Engine (Server) for Linux.

Pre-Conference Workshop and Sessions at PASS Summit

I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting at this year’s PASS Summit. PASS Data Community Summit 2022 is the year’s largest gathering of data platform professionals in the US. This year I have a pre-conference workshop, a regular session, and a Learning Path session. Let’s dive into each. Pre-Conference Workshop: Become a Hybrid Architect My good friend Ben E. Weissman and I will teach a pre-conference workshop called “Become a Hybrid Architect” in this workshop we will cover the foundations needed to design and build a hybrid cloud strategy for your organization.

Setting up SQL Server 2022 s3 Object Storage Integration using MinIO with Docker Compose

In this blog post, I’ve implemented two example environments for using SQL Server 2022’s s3 object integration. One for backup and restore to s3 compatible object storage and the other for data virtualization using Polybase connectivity to s3 compatible object storage. This work aims to get you up and running as quickly as possible to work with these new features. I implemented this in Docker Compose since that handles all the implementation and configuration steps for you.

Setting up MinIO for SQL Server 2022 s3 Object Storage Integration

Introduction In this post, I will walk you through how to set up MinIO, so you can use it to work with SQL Server 2022’s s3 object integrations. Working with s3 and SQL Server requires a valid and trusted TLS certificate. This can be a pain for some users and environments. So I’m writing this post so you can get off the ground running with this new feature set in SQL Server 2022.

Backing up to s3 Compatible Object Storage with SQL Server

Introducing S3 in SQL Server 2022 S3 compatible object storage integration is a new feature introduced in SQL Server 2022. There are two significant areas where SQL Server leverages this: backup and restore and data virtualization. This article will focus on getting started with using S3 compatible object storage for backups. Now let’s unpack that phrase ‘S3 compatible object storage’ a bit. AWS Simple Cloud Storage Service (S3) is a storage service AWS provides in their cloud.