Deploying Windows 10 to AWS using Packer and the AWS PowerShell module

Setup an AWS SES Bounce dashboard monitor with daily email reports-logo

The reason for this post is that I wanted to create a one click solution to deploy a Window 10 machine into AWS.  I wanted the AWS instance to be named in Windows, added to the domain, install applications, name the AWS instance tag an much more.  The tools I initially decided on to create this were VMware, awscli, PowerShell, Terraform and Packer.

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Configuring Azure Active Directory as an Identity Source for multiple applications

The main driver for this post was a project I had started to migrate all of our applications that were currently using Okta as an Identity Source to Azure Active Directory.   An Identity Source is authentication mechanism that you can use instead of the defaults that the application provides.  If you also use Office 365 you probably use Azure AD for Single Sign On (SSO) already.  This can be extended to other applications such as Salesforce not just for Office 365.

The reasons for this were mainly financial as we had already paid for Office 365 E3 + EMS licences.  We therefore had the identity services built in already so it didn’t make sense to continue to pay Okta for the same service.  I will go through setting up a number of applications in Azure AD including; AWS Console, BlueJeans, Concur, Dynatrace, Litmos, EmPerform, PeopleHR, Salesforce and Secret Server.  All applications use SAML and we will go through the configuration for each individual application below.

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