I use Microsoft Fabric on a project to store all customer data. Each customer gets their own workspace, so data is isolated. While Microsoft Fabric has its challenges and comes with a hefty price, it does bring quite a lot of useful data solutions under one umbrella. If you only need to store data in a (simple) database there are many more solutions that will fit your use case better. For my project we need to do ingestion, transformation, cleansing, store structured data, store unstructured data, etc.
Read more →The project I’m working on is in a maturing state. This means it needs to remain stable while still delivering new features. This is where feature toggles come into play. By adding these toggles and conditional execution paths to your code, you can keep the functionality unchanged until you turn a toggle on and then return to the previous behavior by turning it off again.
In the Azure ecosystem, we have the App Configuration resource with fairly basic feature toggle capabilities, so that’s what I’m using because it fits our current needs.
Read more →GitHub Copilot is great, but somehow I get better results and a nicer UX/DX with OpenCode. It integrates with all the models I have available via GitHub Copilot and more.
There’s also a great ecosystem around this software and the documentation is quite good as well. The Awesome OpenCode repository lists quite a few useful tools, plugins and agents. Currently, I use the Smart Title Plugin and Open Agents Control, but Oh My OpenCode also has my interest even though it has a bit of overlap.
Read more →Some time ago I had to validate who or what has access to the applications we created in our Azure environment.
There were hundreds of different applications with each their own specific Application Roles. Both users and service principals had roles assigned to the applications to perform the required operations.
It is possible to click through every application in Entra ID and validate the assigned roles. However, this takes quite a bit of time.
Read more →The project I am working on requires me to deploy our compute solution, .NET and Python, to an Azure service and it should only expose specific endpoints via Azure API Management (APIM). To accomplish this, I have set up some networking services including NSG-rules. The goal is to set up the network boundaries as strict as possible.
One of the things I started with is set up APIM in a subnet, the Container Apps in another subnet and use an NSG to limit traffic to only use port 443.
Read more →The current large language models, like GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4o are great when you need some output generated based on data you feed in the prompt. Even the small language models, like Phi-3, are doing a great job at this. However, these models often don’t know a lot about the data within your company. Because of this, they can’t do a good job at answering questions that required data from your organization.
Read more →Aside from Azure Traffic Manager, Azure Functions, and Azure Service Bus, Azure API Management (APIM) is one of my favourite services to use in just about any solution.
A useful little nugget for APIM is it’s able to have its own Managed Identity. You can choose to use a System Managed Identity or a User Managed Identity. Both options have pros and cons.
When you have configured APIM with a managed identity, this identity can be used to authenticate with the backend services.
Read more →There are a ton of useful Azure resources, and one that I don’t read or hear a lot about is Azure Traffic Manager.
According to the docs:
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer. This service allows you to distribute traffic to your public facing applications across the global Azure regions. Traffic Manager also provides your public endpoints with high availability and quick responsiveness.
Meaning it’s a very good service to make sure the requests to your backend are routed to the backend that’s able to respond the fastest.
Read more →Have you ever been on a project where an API returns a response that you can’t, or don’t want to, handle in your own application? Or a customer asks to generate a different response?
Yeah, me neither…
If you ever come across a project, where they want you to return a response like this:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Connection: Keep-Alive Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: application/json Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2024 20:59:21 GMT { "error": 404, "status": "NotFound", "description": "Could not find the object" } This post is for you!
Read more →For those of you who are reading my posts from time to time, you probably know one of my side projects is a URL minifier solution. It’s one of those services which I’ve created to learn about specific Azure services. I’m still making improvements to it and sometimes adding new features to it altogether.
With the focus on AI and large language models in just about everything nowadays, it is time for me to add it to the URL minifier too.
Read more →