By default, Ansible uses SSH on Linux machines. Although Windows supports an OpenSSH server, this method is not entirely functional with orchestration tools like Ansible. To enable remote command execution, Ansible uses Windows Remote Management (WinRM) on Windows.

Managed identities provide secure authentication for resources accessing other resources in Azure without requiring sensitive information such as secrets, credentials, and certificates to be handled. Microsoft Entra ID manages these identities, enabling applications to obtain tokens for authentication. In this post, I will provide an example that illustrates how to use system and user-assigned managed identities with PowerShell.

Azure Functions often require access to sensitive information. It is a security risk to store credentials in code or configuration files. Thus, protecting sensitive information like connection strings, API keys, or passwords is crucial. This is where Azure Key Vault comes in, offering secure and centralized storage for all your secrets. In this article, I will explain how to retrieve secrets from the Key Vault within an Azure Function using PowerShell.

Sometimes, managing certain Azure resources using PowerShell can be challenging due to the absence of specific cmdlets for those operations or services. This is where the Invoke-AzRestMethod cmdlet comes into play, which allows PowerShell scripts to communicate with Azure services by sending HTTP requests to Azure's REST API. It acts as a bridge between PowerShell and Azure services that still need to be integrated with cmdlets.

In my previous post, I shared a Bash and PowerShell script that enables you to swiftly generate an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from an EC2 instance. In this post, I will be explaining how you can promptly launch an EC2 instance using the AMI.

The provided Bash and PowerShell script helps automate the creation of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) from existing AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. This is particularly useful for creating point-in-time backups or disaster recovery. I mostly use the script to quickly clone an EC2 instance for testing or troubleshooting.

There are various mechanisms for copying files between Windows and Linux. A proven tool for this purpose is Secure Copy (SCP), and with the porting of PowerShell to Linux, it is suitable for this task, too. The connection runs over SSH in both cases, ensuring that files are transferred encrypted.

The post Copying files between Windows and Linux with SCP and PowerShell first appeared on 4sysops.