In love and startups, breakups can be messy affairs. While the majority end with a handshake and parting ways in peace, others end with all your belongings hastily thrown out the front door.  I picked up a new client this week who was experiencing the latter. Their technical co-founder, we’ll call him Ralph, had gone rogue and wanted full rights to all the company’s intellectual property as well as rights to the company name. Ralph loved cigars, and was a regular at a cigar bar a few blocks from his home. There met some wealthy schemers and over a maduro hatched a plan. On the same day my client received a letter from Ralph’s attorneys stating his demands, he used his administrative powers to lock everyone in the company out of their Azure AD accounts, and locked all the developers out of their Azure accounts.

Before I get into how I fit into all of this, a public service announcement. If you’re in cloud technology, your Azure or AWS instance is everything. Please, please, please I beg you, set up your permissions in such a way that no one person can do something like this.  A good idea for a future post methinks.

So my task was to recover the production web apps and SQL databases and transfer them to a new Azure account, without interrupting the production applications. Luckily they still had access to their repositories, which gave me an easy place to start. First step was to copy the SQL database from the locked instance to our new Azure instance. I decided to leverage SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and I gotta say, that shit was smooth as butter.

All I had to do was enter the connection details for the old database, then right click the database to copy and select Tasks>Deploy Database to Microsoft Azure SQL Database. From there I stuck in the connection details for the new SQL server, and it did its thing. I was expecting to hit some kind of issue, though I was happy to be proven wrong.

Next step was to redploy their webapps and get them at the right domains. Here once again we were fortunate. They had purchased their domains through GoDaddy, and Ralph did not have access to that account, so we could still go in and change the DNS records to point to our new servers.

I won’t delve deep into the details on how to set up these domains in Azure, as the Microsoft docs do a good job of walking you through the process. We now new copies of the apps running on new copies of the SQL databases, all on the client’s new instance of Azure, and Ralph just lost some serious bargaining power.

All in all it was pretty quick job. It won’t do much for my bottom line, but I’ve always found that helping someone in a pinch is the best way to create loyal customers. I don’t know Ralph personally, and maybe he had a good reason for doing what he did. All I know is just like watching a couple fight, I don’t want to get anywhere near it beyond what they paid me for.