Posts on Dragos Madarasan

AWS Summit Poland and AWS Cloud Day Prague 2025

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In 2025 I presented session ISV 301 – Mastering resilience at every layer of the cake – together with Adrian Bere at both the AWS Summit Poland in Katowice and AWS Cloud Day Prague.

AWS Community Day Romania 2025

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In April the 2nd edition of AWS Community Day Romania took place in Timisoara, where I delivered the opening keynote alongside Raul Geana.

AI & Big Data Conference Chisinau 2025

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In April I presented at the AI & Big Data Conference in Chisinau, Moldova where I talked about taking generative AI from prototype to production.

AWS CloudDay Prague 2024

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In October I presented at AWS CloudDay Prague 2024 where I delivered session APP306 on resilient architectures at scale with real-life use cases from Amazon.

AWS Community Day Romania 2024

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In October the first ever AWS Community Day Romania took place in Timisoara, a full day of technical sessions organized by the local AWS community.

AWS CloudDay Warsaw 2024

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In September I presented at AWS CloudDay Warsaw 2024 where I delivered session DEV208 on optimizing storage price and performance with Amazon S3.

Banking 4.0 - Sinaia 2023

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000

In November I participated at the Banking 4.0 conference in Sinaia where I was part of a panel on cloud banking and delivered a workshop on AI solutions in banking.

AWS CloudDay Athens 2023

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

In October I presented at AWS CloudDay Athens 2023 where I talked about migrating and modernizing Microsoft workloads on AWS.

AWS Architectural Resilience Day - Bucharest 2023

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

On the 30th of March we organized the AWS Architectural Resilience Day at our AWS offices in Bucharest, a full day of talks and hands-on workshops focused on building resilient workloads.

VMware Technology Forum 2023

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

In March I presented at the VMware Technology Forum 2023 where I talked about accelerating cloud migration with VMware Cloud on AWS.

AWS Pop-up Hub Warsaw 2022

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 10:00:00 +0000

In October I presented at the AWS Pop-up Hub in Warsaw, Poland where I delivered a session on Advanced Amazon VPC design and new capabilities, as well as a workshop on Amazon Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS).

Containerizing Java & .NET applications with AWS App2Container

Sat, 20 Nov 2021 10:00:00 +0000

In November I presented at GoTech 2021 where I talked about quickly containerizing Java and .NET applications using AWS App2Container.

Building Agile Data Applications with Snowflake and AWS

Fri, 07 May 2021 13:00:00 +0000

Together with my friend Piotr Pietrzkiewicz from Snowflake, we built a hands-on lab showing how to integrate Snowflake with AWS serverless services and CI/CD pipelines.

UBB Hacks for Good - 2020 edition!

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 11:37:22 +0000

I’m super excited to be participating in the panel jury for the 2020 edition of UBB Hacks for Good

Migrating SQL Server to AWS webinar

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 10:03:44 +0000

I’m super excited to do my second webinar with PASS, the global community for data professionals who use the Microsoft data platform.

VMware vForum Romania 2019

Fri, 29 Nov 2019 17:28:56 +0000

On Wednesday I presented at VMware vForum Romania 2019 where I talked about Accelerating your cloud migration

AWS Container Hero - Vlad Ionescu

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 14:22:03 +0000

It is with great pleasure that I announce Vlad Ionescu to be the first AWS Container Hero from Romania.

AWS Loft Bucharest 2019

Tue, 05 Nov 2019 10:28:42 +0000

November brings the AWS Loft Bucharest event to Romania! The AWS Lofts are a place where startups and developers can meet over coffee, attend educational..

Well Architected @ Bucharest Loft

Tue, 05 Nov 2019 10:28:42 +0000

I couldn’t help myself and signed up to deliver two sessions and did a repeat of my CDK workshop I did in Kiev.

Start Your A.I. Journey With AWS @ PentaBAR #53

Sun, 20 Oct 2019 17:17:25 +0000

After my first PentaBAR meetup in September, I’m co-presenting again with Catalin Dumitras from Pentalog, this time in Brasov!

AWS Loft Kiev 2019

Fri, 18 Oct 2019 06:14:32 +0000

In October I delivered a workshop on AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) at the AWS Loft Kiev.

Cloud Infrastructure for NGOs - TechSoup Webinar

Sat, 05 Oct 2019 17:22:16 +0000

On October 10, I am hosting a webinar at the invitation of TechSoup Romania. TechSoup Romania is a non-government organization founded in 2010…

Serverless CI/CD pipelines for your DevOps needs @ PentaBAR #31

Sat, 21 Sep 2019 08:34:42 +0000

Together with Catalin Dumitras from Pentalog I presented at the PentaBAR #31 meetup in Iasi….

Well Architected Best Practices - Transylvania Cloud meetup

Wed, 12 Jun 2019 08:15:32 +0000

On Monday I attended the meetup organized by Transilvania Cloud discussing best practices when designing….

AWSome Day Bucharest 2019

Thu, 07 Mar 2019 10:05:18 +0000

On the 12th of March, AWS together with our local partner Bittnet is organizing the 4th edition of the AWSome Day event in Bucharest..

New year, new challenges

Thu, 31 Jan 2019 12:16:22 +0000

Over the summer I’ve been working on updating the Exchange Server on AWS quickstart. Quick Starts are built by AWS Solutions Architects, Professional Services Consultants..

The updated Exchange Server on AWS QuickStart published!

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:25:00 +0000

Over the summer I’ve been working on updating the Exchange Server on AWS quickstart. Quick Starts are built by AWS Solutions Architects, Professional Services Consultants..

Presenting at the upcoming AWS Pop-Up Loft Stockholm

Thu, 18 Oct 2018 12:32:16 +0000

AWS is hosting a Pop-up Loft in Stockholm between in October-November, places where developers and IT professionals can attend educational sessions, work on..

Transylvania Cloud Meetup session

Thu, 18 Oct 2018 12:32:16 +0000

In December I’m heading to my home country Romania to help with a hackathon that and talk about Infrastructure as Code and ..

How to Deploy Local Administrator Password Solution with AWS Microsoft AD

Thu, 08 Jun 2017 09:00:00 +0000

Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS) from Microsoft simplifies password management by allowing organizations to use Active Directory (AD) to store unique passwords for computers

How to copy AMI permissions

Sun, 12 Mar 2017 09:45:19 +0000

Copying AMIs across regions is easy, but how do you copy permissions as well?

Programmatically list AWS services

Mon, 04 Jul 2016 11:36:05 +0000

Someone recently asked about the best way to built an UI on top of the AWS APIs without hardcoding the services

Oneliners – AWS RDS get latest restorable time

Wed, 13 Apr 2016 20:43:11 +0000

This is a one line AWS CLI command to get the latest restorable time for an AWS RDS Instance.

aws rds describe-db-instances --db-instance-identifier "yourDBinstance" --query "DBInstances[*].[DBInstanceIdentifier,LatestRestorableTime]"

AWS Assume role [Powershell]

Sun, 03 Apr 2016 14:12:05 +0000

This is a handy 2 lines Powershell script to assume a role in AWS, create temporary credentials and run another command using the assumed roles:

$Response = (Use-STSRole -Region eu-west-1 -RoleArn arn:aws:iam::<accountID>:role/<RoleName> -RoleSessionName RoleSession1).Credentials

$Credentials = New-AWSCredentials -AccessKey $Response.AccessKeyId -SecretKey $Response.SecretAccessKey -SessionToken $Response.SessionToken

Get-S3Bucket -BucketName yourbucketnamehere -Credential $Credentials

AWS Certified! Tips & tricks

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 00:11:26 +0000

Today I passed my first AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam

AWS getVPCnameById

Wed, 17 Feb 2016 22:04:55 +0000

I was recently looking at retrieving a VPC’s Name based on its id. Here is the Python/Boto3 implementation

from boto3.session import Session
session = Session(aws_access_key_id='aaaa',aws_secret_access_key='XXX',region_name='eu-west-1')
ec2 = session.resource('ec2')

vpc = ec2.Vpc('vpc-6661b904')
vpc.tags[0]['Value']

The one liner version for AWS cli is

aws ec2 describe-vpcs --vpc-ids vpc-6188b904 --query "Vpcs[0].Tags[?Key=='Name'].Value[]" --output text

Troubleshooting Citrix XenApp is out!

Tue, 05 Jan 2016 17:20:14 +0000

PacktPub approached me in the spring of 2015 to write a Citrix book

Exporting unexportable certificates

Sat, 25 Apr 2015 21:32:22 +0000

You sometimes run into cases where a certificate was imported by another sysadmin and he forgot to check the option to export the private key. If you want to export the certificate together with the private key the option would be greyed out.

Unless you have access to the original certificate there is no Windows built-in method to retrieve the certificate. Mimikatz is a nice program that hooks into the Windows NT APIs and allows you to export unexportable certificate.

Going to Microsoft Summit 2014

Tue, 21 Oct 2014 16:10:58 +0000

Have just received confirmation from my employer that I will be able to participate at this year’s Microsoft Summit 2014.

Microsoft Summit, currently at the 2nd edition is probably the largest event for the IT Pro community and a few acquaintances are speaking at the event including Tudor Damian, Adrian Stoian and others.
The event is being held at Willbrook Platinum Business & Convention Center Bucharest (same place as last year) between 12/13 November 2014.

Moving virtual volume between remote copy groups (3PAR)

Sun, 24 Aug 2014 13:25:43 +0000

Moving a 3PAR virtual volume between two remote groups is a scenario

Reviewed Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager

Fri, 22 Nov 2013 22:00:31 +0000

A month ago I was approached by Packtpub to review a book for them

Microsoft Summit 2013 – get discount codes from ITSpark

Thu, 31 Oct 2013 17:26:01 +0000

Why you should attend Microsoft Summit 2013

Invalid Master Key in BES 5.0

Wed, 17 Jul 2013 10:45:16 +0000

Had an interesting problem when trying to add a new Enterprise CAL key to a BES 5.0.3 where I would see the Invalid master key error.

Application deployment in XenMobile

Tue, 09 Jul 2013 19:37:14 +0000

Deploying an application using XenMobile is very easy. The following post will illustrate the steps needed to deploy LastPass

XenMobile 8 installation step by step

Sun, 23 Jun 2013 21:25:37 +0000

Lately I’ve had a particular interest in the MDM (mobile device management) scene where XenMobile (the rebranded Zenprise ) is one of the leaders

ITCamp 2013 – my thoughts

Mon, 27 May 2013 21:24:16 +0000

Taking advantage of the fact that Endava was a platinum sponsor, I couldn’t pass the opportunity to attend this years’ ITCamp.

Using Group Managed Service Accounts

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 14:51:04 +0000

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Windows Server 2012 comes with group managed service accounts, an improved version of the original MSA. Ever since Windows Server 2008 R2 was out, I remember reading about managed service accounts (MSA) a new feature that I wanted to check out. You can read more about MSA here, but in essence they are useful because they have automatic password management.

Introduction

I always wanted to try MSA and was recently in a position to propose using MSAs, but after re-reading the information, specifically “A managed service account can only be installed on a single computer” I decided to skip MSA.

However, I did research if anything had changed since 2008 R2 and apparently it has – Doug Symalla on TechNet has a very interesting article about the new Group Managed Service accounts and how they work in Server 2012.

Upgrading InfoStage Director 7

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 20:39:17 +0000

In this article I will explain the steps needed to upgrade EVault Director (the actual backup software), EVault Reports and Windows CentralControl.

Migrating EVault Web CentralControl

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 12:48:37 +0000

In my previous article I described the steps to upgrade a 32 bit Web Central Control installation to version 7

Upgrading Evault to version 7

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 17:38:53 +0000

I’ve recently had the opportunity to upgrade an Evault production infrastructure and thought I might share how the process went.

Installing SharePoint 2010

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 13:36:57 +0000

I recently published an article on ITSpark about installing SharePoint 2010 on SQL Server 2012. The article is in Romanian and can be read here.

Reading books once more!

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 11:11:46 +0000

After reading Julien Smith’s post How To Read a Book a Week , I was inspired by his commitment to read one book each week and thought I was a great idea.

After previously reading this year David Allen’s Getting Things Done, I started to make a list of things I wanted to read. My Amazon wish list already contained:

What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis so I gave it a go. It took me 2 weeks to finish it. Next, I read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, a very interesting book.

SharePoint permission problem Read Contributor permissions

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 21:41:02 +0000

I recently had the chance to work on a problem concerning permission to access a specific web page in SharePoint 2010.

The error message that almost all of the users were getting was the generic “accessed denied” but using the Check permission button I could verify that the users had at least read permissions to access the site.

Playing along with the permissions I noticed that users having Contributor rights were able to see the page while those with Read permissions did not. I then stumbled on this forum post which perfectly described my situation.

Microsoft Private Cloud TechTalk

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 11:24:15 +0000

A few days before leaving overseas I was invited to talk about Private Cloud concepts with Tudy Damian (MVP, Virtualization) and Adrian Stoian (MVP, System Center).

The recording is in Romanian and can be found here.

Fix Mac OS X not booting PGP

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:30:34 +0000

Last week I got the chance to brush my Mac skills and encountered the following problem.

When using Mac OS X 10.6.* and PGP versions prior to 10.1.2 after upgrading the OS to the latest version (10.6.8) it would not boot anymore.

This is a known bug in PGP which is fixed in PGP 10.1.2 or later. But, if you’ve already done the upgrade you can fix the problem pretty easily without the need to reinstall OSX. Here’s how:

Deploying Adobe Reader with Windows Intune

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 23:13:50 +0000

The other day Adobe just released an update to their flagship product Adobe Reader. While I quickly updated my installation, I decided to try the new Software Installation introduced in Windows Intune 2.0 last year and deploy the update to a couple of computers I manage.

The first problem I encountered was that I couldn’t use my favorite browser and I had to use IE. When I would go to the Software tab and select the task Upload Software, my browser would download an executable and when I would try to run it I would get

Google Apps alias stuck at activate

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 22:28:34 +0000

The other day I combined 2 of my Google Apps domains by adding the second as a domain alias. The problem was that the alias appeared to be stuck and the only option would be “Activate domain alias”. I had already activated the alias by 2 methods so I had no idea what was wrong.

I then read on the forums that being signed in to multiple accounts could prevent a successful activation. I immediately signed off all my accounts and retried. This time, I got an error, saying that Google Webmaster Tools is not enabled for my domain. After activating that service I managed to finally activate the alias.

Google Apps certified!

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 16:27:05 +0000

This week was an exceptional good week, but the the most important accomplishment is that I managed to pass my Google Apps certification exam and I’m now a Google Apps Certified Deployment Specialist.

It was now a matter of pride passing this exam, having been sponsored by a 3rd party who I hope will use my skills in the future.

ITCamp 2011

Mon, 30 May 2011 23:22:53 +0000

Last week I attended ITCamp 2011 a premium conference held in Cluj-Napoca and organized by 2 communities: ITSpark and CodeCamp. Now that I have a bit more time off, I decided to write about my experience.

The first thing that comes to mind is finally! While I like small community events with 20-30 participants, a big event like ITCamp was long overdue. I remember the last TechNet session I attended in Cluj was quite a while ago, in 2007.

Connection Day – Cluj-Napoca

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:02:08 +0000

Tomorrow I will be hosting a presentation and a workshop with fellow ITSpark members Chris, Cosmin and Tudy.

As Tudy has already blogged, the event is part of a 3 cities road-trip (Cluj-Napoca, Bucharest and Timisoara), a series of events held under the auspices of Microsoft with the goal of bringing NGO and IT closer, so they can work and solve problems easier.

SCCM 2007 OSD Issue

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 23:57:41 +0000

Every since I installed SCCM 2007 in the network I manage, I wanted to test the Operating System Deployment (OSD) because it’s much more flexible than what Windows Deployment Services provides.

After looking at numerous guides on how to setup OSD in SCCM 2007 (here and here) I would always end up having this error when trying to PXE boot clients

Downloaded WDSNBP

Architecture: x64

The details below show the information relating to the PXE boot request for this computer. Please provide these details to your Windows Deployment Services Administrator so that this request can be approved.

Strange errors in SCCM 2007

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 13:42:49 +0000

Right after New Years Eve I had to update some packages/advertisements for some new software. That was easy, but the problem was that none of the clients got the advertisements.

I started to troubleshoot the problem and looked at the ConfigMgr Site Status. There I got some really nasty errors one for the MP Control Manager component and another for the MCS Control Manager.

MP Control Manager detected management point is not responding to HTTP requests. The HTTP status code and text is 400, Bad Request.

SQLSaturday 915 - Bucharest 2019

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I had a presentation on Running Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon Web Services at SQLSaturday 915 Bucharest.