Most people who are professionally working with any of the cloud providers use some kind of infrastructure-as-code solution.
For Microsoft Azure, I’m mostly working with ARM- or Bicep templates to describe the resources necessary. While I’ve written ARM templates for years now, I’m enjoying creating Bicep templates a bit more due to the tooling it offers.
There is at least one downside to using these solutions, and that’s the fact most operations are happening on the Azure control plane.
Read more →For a project I’m working on we have a massive ARM template and I had to add some stuff, deployment scripts, to it. While I still have enough love for ARM templates to work with it, creating & deploying big deployment scripts with isn’t a great experience.
However, with Bicep I can create (and debug) the script in a proper PowerShell file and load it in the Bicep template using the loadTextContent function.
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 →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 →With all of the great services in Azure, it’s easy to set up a nice event-driven architecture. You have Storage Queues, Service Bus Queues & Topics, Event Grid and even more services which can help you accomplish great stuff.
I like the three services mentioned here and most of the time they cover the basics of my messaging infrastructure. One thing you need to do yourself is think about the boundaries of your domains and how to organize all of the services.
Read more →In my last post, I described how to create a Hugo website and what I did to migrate from my Miniblog platform, along with some details on how to create the build & deployment pipeline.
I started by deploying my Hugo websites to a regular Azure App Service. This is a full-blown web application platform. It’s a bit too overpowered for hosting a simple, static, website. As I mentioned in the earlier post, it makes a lot more sense to host static websites on an Azure Storage Account with the Static website hosting.
Read more →Any now and then you have to make some major changes to the ARM templates of the project you’re working from. While this isn’t hard to do, it can become quite a time-intensive if you have to wait for the build/deployment server to pick up the changes and the actual deployment itself.
A faster way to test your changes is by using PowerShell or the Azure CLI to deploy your templates and see what happens.
Read more →A couple of weeks ago I was busy creating some proof of concept applications using Blazor, which was still labeled preview at the time.
To get all of this deployed and working in an Azure App Service, I needed the preview .NET Core runtime installed. An App Service is a PaaS offering, which means you don’t have any influence on what version of the software gets installed on the underlying system.
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 →