Change the Windows power profile with a script

Another small post, but a solution to a problem which has annoyed me a lot. Changing the power profile or power scheme in Windows is quite a hassle if you ask me. I have created a ‘High Performance’ profile on my laptop for when I’m doing development work on the machine and also have the ‘Balanced’ profile, which is the default in Windows. However, switching between these profiles is a lot of work (in my opinion). Read more →

List Key Vault Secrets via Azure CLI

This won’t be a long post, but useful nonetheless. It’s more like a script-dump as a post. A while ago, someone assigned a task to me where I had to retrieve all the existing secrets in a specific Key Vault and list them. These secrets were to be placed in another Key Vault on a shared location. The exact reasons for this migration don’t matter for this post, but it has something to do with having a single Key Vault instance compared to having a Key Vault ‘per domain’, which I like a bit better. Read more →

Using Application Roles for authentication in Your Services

A couple of days ago a friend asked me the question ‘How should I authenticate services with each other using roles’. I wanted to point him to a post I wrote last year, ‘Using an Azure Managed Identity to authenticate on a different App Service’, but I noticed this post wasn’t as complete as I remembered it to be. While it does explain how to enable authentication in your service and using a Managed Identity for this, it doesn’t cover how to add roles in your application and assign them to a user or service principal (like a Managed Identity). Read more →

Developing in an Azure Virtual Machine

I’ve been creating solutions for customers on my development laptop for years now. This works great as it’s a portable device and we get to have some great hardware in a compact form nowadays. However, laptops are still quite slow when you compare them to a desktop. This has become quite noticeable to me as I’ve been doing more development on my new desktop. You can get some nice laptops with desktop-like performance, but most of the time it’ll cost a lot of money and will add a couple of pounds in weight. Read more →

Securing Your App Service with a Vnet

My last post was on integrating your Azure App Service with a virtual network (VNet). This post is the other way around. It’s on how to put your App Service in a VNet, or rather, behind a VNet. If you want to put your Azure App Service inside a VNet, you’ll have to look for the App Service Environment (ASE). This is an offering of dedicated machines that are placed inside a VNet and you’re paying a rather hefty fee for this. Read more →

Vnet Integration for Your App Service

It’s always a good idea to secure the resources in your Azure subscriptions. One way to do this is by using virtual networks. In a lot of cases, you will put SQL Azure servers, storage accounts and, other services in a virtual network. This will make sure the services can’t be accessed from the public internet unless you explicitly say so. There are many more advantages to putting services in a virtual network, which I won’t be covering in this post. Read more →

Deploying Azure Functions on a Linux Service Plan

Some time ago, about 7 months, I had to build a service that creates a PDF document from HTML. The library of choice was IronPDF. Creating PDF documents with this library is a breeze, but we stumbled across a small issue. The HTML-to-PDF-converter-service is hosted inside an Azure Function, for reasons. We noticed creating the documents took quite a lot of time. After inspecting the allocated instances we discovered both the CPU and Memory were constantly spiking to maximum capacity. Read more →

Use the Copy function to deploy multiple resources after each other

A while ago I was confronted with the fact one of our Azure App Services needed multiple hostname bindings. I was planning to do this by making multiple Microsoft.Web/sites/hostNameBindings resources, for this specific App Service, in our ARM template. When deploying I was confronted with the following error { "ErrorEntity": { "Code": "Conflict", "Message": "Cannot modify this site because another operation is in progress. [some more details]", "ExtendedCode": "59203", "MessageTemplate": "Cannot modify this site because another operation is in progress. Read more →

Create Storage Queue and Table Storage in your deployment

You’re probably familiar with Azure Storage Accounts. They are great and cheap! Also, it’s possible to add the features Storage Queues & Table Storage on those accounts. I’m using Storage Queues a lot! Most of the time because I don’t need the enterprise features which Azure Service Bus offers me. Table Storage is also great if you want to store data in a cheap NoSQL-style database. While I try to avoid Table Storage, in favor of Cosmos DB most of the time, this ‘old’ service still has value in lots of use-cases. Read more →

Creating an Event Grid Topic subscription to a resource in a different resource group

With all of the great services in Azure, it’s easy to set up a nice event-driven architecture. You have Storage Queues, Service Bus Queues & Topics, Event Grid and even more services which can help you accomplish great stuff. I like the three services mentioned here and most of the time they cover the basics of my messaging infrastructure. One thing you need to do yourself is think about the boundaries of your domains and how to organize all of the services. Read more →