For those of you who are following me on Twitter, you might have seen my Philips Hue bridge was acting up in the past couple of months. Major bandwith usage, automations not being triggered at the appropriate times, and even the internet connectivity wasn’t working anymore. The bridge is also about 14 years old, so it might have been its time to shut down.
A relative cheap solution would be to buy a new Philips Hue bridge and set that up.
Read more →Most people who are professionally working with any of the cloud providers use some kind of infrastructure-as-code solution.
For Microsoft Azure, I’m mostly working with ARM- or Bicep templates to describe the resources necessary. While I’ve written ARM templates for years now, I’m enjoying creating Bicep templates a bit more due to the tooling it offers.
There is at least one downside to using these solutions, and that’s the fact most operations are happening on the Azure control plane.
Read more →For a project I’m working on we have a massive ARM template and I had to add some stuff, deployment scripts, to it. While I still have enough love for ARM templates to work with it, creating & deploying big deployment scripts with isn’t a great experience.
However, with Bicep I can create (and debug) the script in a proper PowerShell file and load it in the Bicep template using the loadTextContent function.
Read more →When you need to work with service principals in your Azure environment, you are probably creating them via some script using the az ad sp command.
This works quite well, but these are created with your account. The account you used to log in with the Azure CLI. The same goes when using PowerShell, it’s always running in the context you used to log in. Most of the time your personal or environment administrator account.
Read more →I’ve been working with the Power Platform for a couple of weeks now, and I’m pretty impressed by the functionality it offers.
Lots of scenarios can be covered by using these tools as a frontend for applications we need to serve to our customers, and there’s also a very nice integration with Microsoft Teams! However, there’s always this special little snowflake that can’t easily be accomplished within a Power App. The keyword over there is ’easily'.
Read more →It so happens a lot of people are mixing their work- and personal development machines, especially when doing side projects in their spare time which are somewhat work-related.
At least, this is the case for me as I’m using GitHub both for work & personal stuff nowadays.
On my personal machine, I’ve set up Git to work with my personal e-mail address & SSH keys.
On my work machine, I’ve set it up to run with my work account.
Read more →In my previous post, I wrote how to create & host private build agents for Azure DevOps running in Azure Container Instances.
One of the reasons for doing so is to eliminate creating build agent VM’s and performant pipelines for my side projects. But, of course, the build agents also need to be as cheap as possible. Azure Container Instances have per-second billing, which is excellent for build agent containers.
Read more →I’ve been complaining for a while about how slow the hosted build agent in Azure DevOps is. The reason for this is simple, as it’s a shared, free, hosted agent.
A solution for this is to host your agents, for example, via a virtual machine.
I’m not a big fan of maintaining virtual machines, and then it struck me that we now have containers that are sort of the same but easier to manage.
Read more →I was at the office a couple of weeks back, browsed some of my favorite news sites, and was shocked by what I saw. Ads, ads everywhere!
At home, I’ve been running Pi-hole on my Synology NAS in a container for months now. I hardly see any (annoying) advertisements on any of my devices because of this.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind seeing a couple of relevant ads.
Read more →When working in Azure, storing secrets in Key Vault is a good idea. And to make it better, there’s the Key Vault Reference notation. This feature makes sure no one can read the secret(s) unless someone grants permission.
For storing configuration, values a different service is available, called Azure App Configuration.
Both services are excellent for storing & sharing the values of your cloud services.
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to combine the two?
Read more →