Create a Service Principal to create and manage other Service Principals

When you need to work with service principals in your Azure environment, you are probably creating them via some script using the az ad sp command. This works quite well, but these are created with your account. The account you used to log in with the Azure CLI. The same goes when using PowerShell, it’s always running in the context you used to log in. Most of the time your personal or environment administrator account. Read more →

Creating a native Teams app with Dataverse integration

I’ve been working with the Power Platform for a couple of weeks now, and I’m pretty impressed by the functionality it offers. Lots of scenarios can be covered by using these tools as a frontend for applications we need to serve to our customers, and there’s also a very nice integration with Microsoft Teams! However, there’s always this special little snowflake that can’t easily be accomplished within a Power App. The keyword over there is ’easily'. Read more →

Manage Azure Container Instances in Azure Functions based on running pipelines in Azure DevOps

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 →

Create a private build agent using Azure Container Instances

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 →

Using Key Vault references with Azure App Configuration

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 →