You might have noticed I’ve been doing quite a bit of stuff with ARM templates as of late. ARM templates are THE way to go if you want to deploy your Azure environment in a professional and repeatable fashion.

As it happens, I started implementing some new functionality on a project. For this functionality, I needed an Azure Storage Account with a folder (containers) inside. Because it’s a project not maintained by me, I had to do some searching on how to create such a container in the most automated way, because creating containers in storage account isn’t supported… That is, until recently!

There’s a relative new feature available in Azure called Managed Service Identity. What it does is create an identity for a service instance in the Azure AD tenant, which in its turn can be used to access other resources within Azure. This is a great feature, because now you don’t have to maintain and create identities for your applications by yourself anymore. All of this management is handled for you when using a System Assigned Identity. There’s also an option to use User Assigned Identities which work a bit different.

I’m in the process of adding an ARM template to an open source project I’m contributing to. All of this was pretty straightforward, until I needed to add some secrets and connection strings to the project.

Warming up your web applications and websites is something which we have been doing for quite some time now and will probably be doing for the next couple of years also. This warmup is necessary to ‘spin up’ your services, like the just-in-time compiler, your database context, caches, etc.