Azure

The Azure web GUI is quite immature. For instance, if you install the Azure Storage Explorer (Windows only) it doesn't show timestamps of files. Fortunately, a lot (everything?) can be done from the command line. This, for instance, mounts a SMB drive in the cloud on my local Linux box where it can be treated as any other directory:

sudo mount -t cifs //XXX.file.core.windows.net/DIRECTORY /mnt/DIRECTORY -o vers=3.0,username=USERNAME,password=GET_THIS_FROM_THE_WEB_GUI,dir_mode=0777,file_mode=0777,serverino 

Also, if you want to put a multi-line value into Microsoft's Key Vault, you'll find you can't do it in the web GUI. You need to put the text with line returns into YOUR_FILE and use:

az keyvault secret set --name YOUR_KEY --vault-name VAULT_NAME --value "`cat YOUR_FILE`"

Docker and K8s in the Azure cloud

First, tag your image with something like:

docker tag 8d2be7e5d4eb XXX.azurecr.io/YYY:1.0

where XXX is your image repository subdomain in Azure and YYY is the name of the artifact. Login with:

az acr login -n XXX

and now you can push your artifact into the Azure infrastructure:

docker push XXX.azurecr.io/YYY

(You might need to run az acr login -n XXX first) 

Let's check it works:

kubectl run -i --tty --attach ARBITRARY_NAME --image=XXX.azurecr.io/YYY:1.0  --command -- /bin/bash

and behold, we are on the CLI of a remote container in the Azure cloud.

But don't forget to clean up after ourselves with:

kubectl delete deployment ARBITRARY_NAME

Network Speeds

By having your image pushed to K8s, you can run your code in Azure as easily as your laptop. The big benefit is network speeds. In my case, I was decrypting an RSA encoded file taken from BLOB storage at about 1mb/s on my (well specced) laptop but exactly the same code was easily managing 10mb/s in the Azure cloud. (Yes, I know that using asymmetric ciphers for large files is not efficient [SO] but this was imposed on us by our client). By using jstack, I could see that the threads on my laptop were spending most of their time in IO not Bouncy Castle.