Hey there, thanks for visiting! I’m Mike Kauspedas, a sys admin working in the cloud mostly with Microsoft. This blog is mainly a collection of notes for myself that I’ve also tried to format for public consumption. I try to post the odd issues I don’t regularly find solutions for online. Hopefully one of my posts gives you a hand. As of 2015 I’ve been working for an awesome company called Customerville. Customerville is a Customer Experience company that helps other businesses collect feedback on … you guessed it, customer experience. You’d be surprised how complex that can get on the IT side. Recently I lead us through a SOC II Type 2 audit for security and converted our MSSQL vms and databases over to Azure SQL. I’ve written and enforced all our IT security policies and controls for SOC and GDPR compliance.
I know work for a company called IFS in their ITAR team. Still on Azure, but now with Oracle and moah linux.
How does this blog work?
Azure! Here’s how this blog works. First, it’s WordPress (if it wasn’t obvious). Way back in the day I tried to learn how to code and started with Coldfusion and wrote my own blog. But I was dumb and WordPress is much better and easier. Since I’ve been using WordPress well before they had a hosting option I’ve continued to maintain my own WordPress install and database. The database is running MySQL in-app mysql with the Azure app. The site has been upgraded to a container in an app service with a traditional mysql server. https://www.mikesaysmeh.com/site-upgrades/
Before Azure I had a server running IIS + MySQL, and at one point a LAMP (linux, apache, MySQL, php) setup but maintaining servers and updates and paying for them sucks. This is the future, servers are meh. Inside Azure I have a single web app running on a Shared: 0 Small app service (web worker). Once Azure released MySQL in App I jumped on it because it’s free! The site runs through CloudFlare (free) and I use their free SSL. To get that working you can check out my article here.
It still runs through cloudflare but I’m using a free managed certificate from Azure. it automatically renews and is set and forget, unlike let’s encrypt which had a few more steps.
