I recently had to create a Logic App, which is responsible for copying data from one Cosmos DB database to another.
To do this, you can use the standard building blocks available in a Logic App workflow.
While doing so, I did stumble across one issue. When you supply a Partition Key for a specific collection, and some entries have null as a value for this Partition Key, you’ll get into a bit of trouble.
Read more →In one of my most recent live coding sessions, I had an issue with my PowerShell configuration. When running any of the Azure PowerShell cmdlets I got the message
The ‘[command]’ command was found in the module ‘Az.[someModule]’, but the module could not be loaded. For more information, run the ‘Import-Module Az.someModule’
Running the Import-Module command didn’t help much, because the module was already loaded. I even tried Import-Module Az and verified everything was installed correctly with the Get-InstalledModule -Name Az* command.
Read more →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →