Using PowerShell to Add a Subdomain

Azure PowerShell Version 1.0 has great benefits, and also has many breaking changes. Since I wrote about updating a naked domain RecordSet, I received a few questions. This is a post about adding a Subdomain to an existing RecordSet.

Most of breaking changes are minor. If your script leveraged Azure Resource Manager (ARM), start by replacing ‘-Azure‘ with ‘-AzureRm‘. This change was made because the Switch-AzureMode CmdLet was removed.

Login-AzureRmAccount -SubscriptionName 'Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN'

$zone = Get-AzureRmDnsZone -Name 'alexandrebrisebois.com' `
                           -ResourceGroupName 'BriseboisDNS'

$recordSet = New-AzureRmDnsRecordSet -Name 'liveqna' `
                                     -Zone $zone `
                                     -Ttl 60 `
                                     -RecordType CNAME

Add-AzureRmDnsRecordConfig -RecordSet $recordSet `
                           -Cname 'liveqna.eastus.cloudapp.azure.com'

# Don't forget to use the Set-AzureRmDnsRecordSet cmdlet
# to apply the changes

Set-AzureRmDnsRecordSet -RecordSet $recordSet

Resolve-DnsName -Name 'liveqna.alexandrebrisebois.com' 
                -Type ALL 
                -DnsOnly

Moving to Azure DNS

25/03/2016 – Updated with Resource Manager CMDLETs

In preparation for my next blog post, I decided to move the domain name server (DNS) records for alexandrebrisebois.com to the Microsoft Azure DNS.

Why?

Over the years, I’ve been very happy with the DNS services that I’ve used to host my DNS Records. Since, I rarely needed to log into these services, I’ve come accustomed to resetting my credentials. A recent need to make changes to these DNS Records, has pushed me to think about ways to streamline this process.

Along the way, I realized that there’s just something very appealing about centralizing everything to my Microsoft Azure environments. From compute to storage to networking, being capable of manipulating everything through PowerShell has turned out to be useful. The idea of being able to manipulate my DNS Records from this same environment felt like the right thing to do. Plus you get the added benefit of performance and availability.

Scaling an FTP Ingestion Service

Making an FTP Ingestion Service Highly Available (HA) can be a challenge. On Azure, we can take advantage of the Microsoft Azure Traffic Manager to direct users to the closest FTP Server. In this specific scenario, we assume that all FTP Servers are configured the same way and that users only have write access. When a document is uploaded over FTP, it is moved to a Microsoft Azure Storage Account that is used as persistent storage.