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 →Normally when you are creating new appointments via Outlook in your organization you are inviting everyone who should join the meeting. This works quite alright, but not something I wanted to do for a couple of meetings I am planning. The meetings I’m organizing are optional to everyone inside the company, therefore I don’t want to spam the inbox of everyone with a meeting most of them (probably around 95%) aren’t interested in.
Read more →You might remember me writing on how to warm up your App Service instances when moving between slots. The use of the applicationInitialization-element is implemented on nearly every IIS webserver nowadays and works great, until it doesn’t.
I’ve been working on a project which has been designed, as I’d like to call it, a distributed monolith. To give you an oversimplified overview, here’s what we have.
First off we have a single page web application which communicates directly to an ASP.
Read more →The last two posts had me writing about how logging can be implemented in your Azure Functions and how you can reuse class libraries using a different logging library, like log4net. You probably already have some logging- and monitoring system in place, but if you’re starting to use Azure Functions (or any other Azure service for that matter), the best tooling to use is Application Insights, in my opinion. You don’t even have to use Azure services in order to use Application Insights.
Read more →As I mentioned in my earlier post, there are 2 options available to you out of the box for logging. You can either use the TraceWriter or the ILogger. While this is fine when you are doing some small projects or Functions, it can become a problem if you want your Azure Functions to reuse earlier developed logic or modules used in different projects, a Web API for example.
In these shared class libraries you are probably leveraging the power of a ‘full-blown’ logging library.
Read more →Creating a solution with multiple small services is great of course. It provides you with a lot of flexibility and scalability.
There are however a couple of things you have to think about when designing and developing a solution with multiple services. One of the things you need to figure out is how to implement proper logging. For an actual production system you need to have this in place in order to monitor and debug the overall solution.
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