Having setup a Microsoft Azure account, my first run in with the service was everything was sold in California and my son and I were relocating to Arizona. Instead of paying for Spotify or Pandora for music, the collection that has been building for my hobby of collecting music over the years had just been completely re-ripped to the NAS as high quality mp3’s. The collection is about 250GB and over 20k files. Not really sure of who is actually doing anything like this in the world anymore but my goal was to see if the collection could be playable from the cloud like a radio station to my phone, blue toothed to the trucks radio and enjoyed for the long drive.
At home there has been a VM setup with an Ubuntu server OS, java JDK 8 installed and subsonic which would create a network music service in the house. How is this accomplished in the cloud though? Taking a couple days clicking around, an ubuntu server was created with a static IP. The DNS for the URL to be used was setup to the Azure VM and Certbot was used to establish an SSL to encrypt connections. The phone was whipped out, connected to the URL, library updated and the tunes were playing like a Touch Tunes jukebox at Applebee’s! This was awesome and affordable too!
The ride to Arizona was a good one and then continued on to Texas, then Florida, Arkansas and will continue on in future travels. With this experience being had, it was now time to try a website. A simple HTML/CSS website was pretty easy to setup, transfer the index.html file and *.CSS files via SSH. It ran beautifully and again, affordable. Next was to upgrade the webpage to a WordPress site, the thinking was that this shouldn’t be that difficult.
Setting up ubuntu server, enabling the OS firewall, UFW, LAMP, and setting up for WordPress to be downloaded and connected to the “M” in LAMP (M refers to the MySQL database). Everything was running great, started building the page and instantly, one by one each image being uploaded was seemingly dissolving away. The site was under attack and there was no indication as to how or from where, just that things were fizzling away.
Things have been rebuilt and running back at the house while some more research is being done and while the Cloud+ class being attended finishes out. One thing that has stood out is security services that have been brought up by Azure. One being Microsoft Defender that only costs a dollar or two per month to add on to the additional services that is being projected to run. One more time has been put into if it is needed to setup a virtual network with a firewall or not, Azure says it isn’t needed, this is something that needs to be answered and then the TekTinkers webpage, database, everything goes up to the cloud. This is totally exciting as then my power bill will lower, my bandwidth needs from the ISP will be lowered saving money by about $100 a month!
Just gotta get this cloud security nailed down and this will be a service that will for sure be taken advantage of!