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.
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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!
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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.
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So you might remember me posting about using the Let’s Encrypt site extension for Azure App Services, called Azure Let’s Encrypt, created by SJKP.
This has quite well for over a year now and even works for Function Apps.
However, last month I got notified my SSL certificate was expired on one of my sites. Strange, as an automated job should just handle this for me. I thought the job probably didn’t execute because of some glitch in the matrix.
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Warming up your web applications and websites is something which we have been doing for quite some time now and will probably be doing for the next couple of years also. This warmup is necessary to ‘spin up’ your services, like the just-in-time compiler, your database context, caches, etc.
I’ve worked in several teams where we had solved the warming up of a web application in different ways. Running smoke-tests, pinging some endpoint on a regular basis, making sure the IIS application recycle timeout is set to infinite and some more creative solutions.
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Using certificates to secure, sign and validate information has become a common practice in the past couple of years. Therefore, it makes sense to use them in combination with Azure Functions as well.
As Azure Functions are hosted on top of an Azure App Service this is quite possible, but you do have to configure something before you can start using certificates.
Adding your certificate to the Function App Let’s just start at the beginning, in case you are wondering on how to add these certificates to your Function App.
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You might remember me writing a post on how you can set up your site with SSL while using Let’s Encrypt and Azure App Services.
Well, as it goes, the same post applies for Azure Functions. You just have to do some extra work for it, but it’s not very hard.
Simon Pedersen, the author of the Azure Let’s Encrypt site extension, has done some work in explaining the steps on his GitHub wiki page.
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In the past couple of years the software industry has come a long way in professionalizing the development environment. One of the things which has improved significantly is automating the builds and being able to continuously deploy software.
Having a continuous integration and -deployment environment is the norm nowadays, which means I (and probably you as a reader also) want to have this when creating Azure Functions also!
There are dozens of build servers and deployment tools available, but because Azure Functions are highly likely being deployed in Microsoft Azure, it makes sense to use Visual Studio Team Services with Release Management.
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Lately, I’ve been busy learning more about creating serverless solutions. Because my main interest lies within the Microsoft Azure stack I surely had to check out the Azure Functions offering.
Azure Functions enable you to create a serverless solutions which are completely event-based. As it’s located within the Azure space, you can integrate easily with all of the other Azure services, like for example the service bus, Cosmos DB, storage, but also external services like SendGrid and GitHub!
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It has become increasingly important to have your site secured via some kind of certificate. Even your Google ranking is affected by it.
The main problem with SSL/TLS certificates is the fact most of them cost money. Now, I don’t have any problem with paying some money for something like a certificate, but it will cost quite a lot if I want to set this up for all of my sites & domains.
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