Setting up an Azure Active Directory application to retrieve Let’s Encrypt certificates

So you might remember me posting about using the Let’s Encrypt site extension for Azure App Services, called Azure Let’s Encrypt, created by SJKP. This has quite well for over a year now and even works for Function Apps. However, last month I got notified my SSL certificate was expired on one of my sites. Strange, as an automated job should just handle this for me. I thought the job probably didn’t execute because of some glitch in the matrix. Read more →

Move Up with Azure

In a couple of weeks, on the 22nd of February, I’ll be talking at a free event organized by 4DotNet and SnelStart called Move Up with Azure. I’m not the only one who will be speaking over there, there’s also a great session by Henry Been (SnelStart) and an awesome talk from Christos Matskas (Microsoft). I myself will be talking on how to create a serverless solution using Azure Functions. This of course is a very broad subject and I’d like to know what you think I should focus on or what you would like to see covered in this session? Read more →

Warming up your App Service

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. I’ve worked in several teams where we had solved the warming up of a web application in different ways. Running smoke-tests, pinging some endpoint on a regular basis, making sure the IIS application recycle timeout is set to infinite and some more creative solutions. Read more →

It’s a brand new year!

A new year has started, so it’s time to reflect and think of what we’ll be doing the rest of this new year. 2017 has been a great year for me, not only from a technical point of view, but also personally. First of all, I have had the chance to be an amazing dad for our son. Being a dad is the best thing one can imagine. Seeing the joy in your child’s eyes whenever you get home and seeing him grow up so quickly is just amazing! Read more →

Loading certificates with Azure Functions

Using certificates to secure, sign and validate information has become a common practice in the past couple of years. Therefore, it makes sense to use them in combination with Azure Functions as well. As Azure Functions are hosted on top of an Azure App Service this is quite possible, but you do have to configure something before you can start using certificates. Adding your certificate to the Function App Let’s just start at the beginning, in case you are wondering on how to add these certificates to your Function App. Read more →