It so happens a lot of people are mixing their work- and personal development machines, especially when doing side projects in their spare time which are somewhat work-related.
At least, this is the case for me as I’m using GitHub both for work & personal stuff nowadays.
On my personal machine, I’ve set up Git to work with my personal e-mail address & SSH keys.
On my work machine, I’ve set it up to run with my work account.
Read more →In my previous post, I wrote how to create & host private build agents for Azure DevOps running in Azure Container Instances.
One of the reasons for doing so is to eliminate creating build agent VM’s and performant pipelines for my side projects. But, of course, the build agents also need to be as cheap as possible. Azure Container Instances have per-second billing, which is excellent for build agent containers.
Read more →I’ve been complaining for a while about how slow the hosted build agent in Azure DevOps is. The reason for this is simple, as it’s a shared, free, hosted agent.
A solution for this is to host your agents, for example, via a virtual machine.
I’m not a big fan of maintaining virtual machines, and then it struck me that we now have containers that are sort of the same but easier to manage.
Read more →I was at the office a couple of weeks back, browsed some of my favorite news sites, and was shocked by what I saw. Ads, ads everywhere!
At home, I’ve been running Pi-hole on my Synology NAS in a container for months now. I hardly see any (annoying) advertisements on any of my devices because of this.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind seeing a couple of relevant ads.
Read more →When working in Azure, storing secrets in Key Vault is a good idea. And to make it better, there’s the Key Vault Reference notation. This feature makes sure no one can read the secret(s) unless someone grants permission.
For storing configuration, values a different service is available, called Azure App Configuration.
Both services are excellent for storing & sharing the values of your cloud services.
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to combine the two?
Read more →It has been quite a while since I’ve sat behind my computer.
The reason for it? Well, I’ve had a bad case of a bacteria infection. This infection started sometime early in January.
A couple of days later, I was in the hospital, where the doctors diagnosed me with the infection. It was so severe; they had to perform surgery on my left arm immediately to cleanse it. Of course, I also needed lots and lots of antibiotics to get rid of the bacteria.
Read more →It’s the time of the year when you see lots of bloggers & content creators making a post, video, or something else to reflect on the past year and make predictions for the next.
Well, this year, I’m one of them!
We all know a lot of stuff has happened in the past year. I’m trying to keep a positive mind and not focus too much on life’s negative things. Focussing on the good things in life makes me much happier and energetic.
Read more →I’m busy locking down my web applications in Azure and using my learnings on the day job. One way to do this is by making sure all requests are authenticated, and roles are granted accordingly.
Using the correct issuer While checking out the token, I found the issuer (iss) contains the following value https://sts.windows.net/[tenantid]/.
{ "aud": "f4c42c68-c881-4320-815c-1ca4f32cb6c5", "iss": "https://sts.windows.net/[tenantid]/", "iat": 1605812881, // all other properties of your token } The issuer is valid, but not the one I was expecting.
Read more →You might know it’s possible to add Azure Active Directory users and groups to Azure SQL Databases by running a command like this one:
CREATE USER [My-DB-Administrators] FROM EXTERNAL PROVIDER WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo; GO alter role db_owner ADD member [My-DB-Administrators] GO If you ever wanted to automate this via a script in a deployment pipeline or some Azure worker process, you probably noticed this didn’t work as expected.
Well, this has changed!
Read more →Some time ago, someone assigned me a task to retrieve data from several data sources residing in multiple Azure subscriptions, using a Logic App.
Creating these shouldn’t be very difficult when using API Connections and using the data repositories’ connection strings. However, I don’t like specifying these connection strings anywhere in my ARM template nor Key Vault.
What I DO want to use is the listKeys function in my deployment template.
Read more →