I’ve written about empowering your Teams with Azure Functions a while back, but this isn’t the only way to create value. You can also use Azure Logic Apps.
Logic Apps are a way to express powerful integrations with (several different) systems in a visual workflow based way. It has a lot of similarities with other (Microsoft) workflow systems from the past, so it should strike very familiar to most (Enterprise) developers.
Read more →In today’s world we’re receiving an enormous amount of e-mail.
A lot of the e-mail I’m receiving during the day (and night) is about errors happening in our cloud environment and sometimes someone needs to follow up on this.
At the moment this is a real pain because there’s a lot of false-positives in those e-mails due to the lack of configuration and possibilities in our monitoring software. The amount of e-mails is so painful, most of us have created email rules so these monitoring emails ‘go away’ and we only check them once per day.
Read more →The default Azure Functions runtime comes with quite a lot of bindings and triggers which enable you to create a highly scalable solution within the Azure environment. You can connect to service buses, storage accounts, Event Grid, Cosmos DB, HTTP calls, etc.
However, sometimes this isn’t enough.
That’s why the Azure Functions team has released functionality which enables you to create your own custom bindings. This should make it easy for you to read and write data to any service or location you need to, even if it’s not supported out of the box.
Read more →Happy 2019 all!
Just like every other blogger on the world, I also want to write a small retrospective on 2018 and prospective on 2019.
Let’s start with the retrospective first. As I mentioned last year, we were expecting a daughter somewhere in January of 2018. As it happens, she is born on January 24th and very healthy. Even though this was still early in the year, I knew for a fact this day would be the best one of the entire year.
Read more →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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.
While it’s totally possible to integrate these secrets in your ARM parameter file or in your continuous deployment pipeline, I wanted to do something a bit more advanced and secure. Of course, Azure Key Vault comes to mind!
Read more →