Christos Polydorou

The Secure File Transfer Protocol or SFTP has been one of the most secure and reliable ways to exchange files between two systems for as long as I can remember. Especially for system-to-system communications that require authentication using keys. Storage accounts on the other hand are a more modern way to handle data, providing blob service along with the traditional SMB and NFS file shares. SMB and NFS are not suitable for communications over the public internet leaving us with blob as the only option - apart from deploying a Linux machine.   Fortunately, Microsoft decided to add SFTP support to the blob service of the storage account. To enable the SFTP support for your storage account, you have to enable the hierarchical namespace feature and of course, the SFTP support, as shown in the below screenshot: To confirm that the functionality has been enabled for your storage account, you may check the Settings of the storage account where a new blade named SFTP should be avail...

Containers have been around for almost a decade and can now be considered as the de-facto approach to application development. From a test and development MySQL server to the most famous internet services like Google and Netflix, containers are the way to run modern applications. So, what is a container exactly? Containers are packages of software that contain all of the necessary elements to run in any environment. In this way, containers virtualize the operating system and run anywhere, from a private data center to the public cloud or even on a developer’s personal laptop. The number of persons that are using containers has skyrocketed in recent years, making Docker Desktop the major platform for running containers on Windows and macOS systems. Being a container user myself, I realized that a set of functions in Powershell would make my life a lot easier when it comes to the standard operations with Docker Desktop. I've put together all the functions that I needed at some point ...