My new desktop build

I’ve been using my current desktop for almost 8 years now and it’s still running quite fine! In order to support 3 monitors, including at least one 4K, the graphics card did get an update to a GTX 950 a while back. But other than that it’s still exactly the same and quite performant. Development is snappy enough, browsing still superb and doing some light modifications in Lightroom or Photoshop is doable. Read more →

Deploying your ARM templates via PowerShell

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. Most of the time these templates get deployed in your Release pipeline to the Test, Acceptance or Production environment. Of course, I’ve set this up for all of my professional projects along with my side projects. Read more →

Adding authentication to your HTTP triggered Azure Functions

Azure Functions are great! HTTP triggered Azure Functions are also great, but there’s one downside. All HTTP triggered Azure Functions are publicly available. While this might be useful in a lot of scenario’s, it’s also quite possible you don’t want ‘strangers’ hitting your public endpoints all the time. One way you can solve this is by adding a small bit of authentication on your Azure Functions. For HTTP Triggered functions you can specify the level of authority one needs to have in order to execute it. Read more →

Creating a new Storage account with containers using ARM

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! In order to create a container inside a storage account, you only have to add a new resource to it. Read more →

Using MSI with Azure Functions and Key Vault

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. Read more →