Adding new documents to Cosmos DB with null as a PartitionKey value

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 →

List Key Vault Secrets via Azure CLI

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 →

Using Application Roles for authentication in Your Services

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). Read more →

Developing in an Azure Virtual Machine

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 →

Securing Your App Service with a Vnet

My last post was on integrating your Azure App Service with a virtual network (VNet). This post is the other way around. It’s on how to put your App Service in a VNet, or rather, behind a VNet. If you want to put your Azure App Service inside a VNet, you’ll have to look for the App Service Environment (ASE). This is an offering of dedicated machines that are placed inside a VNet and you’re paying a rather hefty fee for this. Read more →