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 →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 →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 →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).
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