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There is a nice article on Azure AD on the things to consider when thinking about working with Azure Active Directory. "Microsoft's identity and access management (IAM) strategy has mostly been playing out in the cloud with its Azure AD service." "Microsoft has three components that power its Azure IAM solutions." Azure cloud computing services, which serve as Microsoft's infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution Azure AD Premium, [..] Microsoft's "Identity Management as a Service" offering (abbreviated as "IDaaS"). Microsoft's IDaaS provides IAM services for Azure services that are built on the Azure platform. "identity bridge" solutions. An identity bridge is an on-premises component that's used to synchronize local directories to Microsoft's IDaaS and enable single sign-on to IDaaS. Microsoft's identity bridge solutions can bridge Kerberos and LDAP to JSON over REST, as well as SAML. Mark Dio

Containers are a powerful means of cleanly isolating applications without the tremendous overhead of having each application running in its own virtual machine. So far, the Docker project brought containers to the Linux operating system(s). Sources: Containers: Docker, Windows and Trends by Mark Russinovich Windows Containers Debut in New Windows Server 2016 Preview Keywords: Windows Server, Docker, Containers, Virtualization

For those playing with networking at home and who have an Domain Controller with Active Directory set up (although it would not be needed) and likely have that main server running as a virtual machine it is interesting to know if it has any side effects to revert back to old snapshots. Asking yourself this question, you will pretty quickly find many articles and posts that this would be a bad idea. The why is likely not found so quickly. The linked blog post nicely explains why. In short: You do not want your update sequence number (USN) getting out of sync. Furthermore starting with Windows Server 2012 cloning an AD server IS supported. Sources: Virtual Domain Controller Cloning in Windows Server 2012 Never Snapshot a Domain Controller! Here’s Why… Snapshots and Domain Controllers - Are they ALWAYS bad??? Keywords: Windows Server, Active Directory, Domain Controller, Virtualization, Snapshot