(Almost) No one likes writing code meant to store data to a repository, queues, blobs. Let alone triggering your code when some event occurs in one of those areas. Luckily for us the Azure Functions team has decided to use bindings for this.
By leveraging the power of bindings, you don’t have to write your own logic to store or retrieve data. Azure Functions provides all of this functionality out of the box!
Read more →In the past couple of years the software industry has come a long way in professionalizing the development environment. One of the things which has improved significantly is automating the builds and being able to continuously deploy software.
Having a continuous integration and -deployment environment is the norm nowadays, which means I (and probably you as a reader also) want to have this when creating Azure Functions also!
There are dozens of build servers and deployment tools available, but because Azure Functions are highly likely being deployed in Microsoft Azure, it makes sense to use Visual Studio Team Services with Release Management.
Read more →As with almost every application there is a point where you have to work with some kind of secret, like for example a connection string to a database. There are multiple ways to retrieve these secrets and this isn’t any different with Azure Functions.
If you have set up a continuous deployment build within Visual Studio Release Management you can just substitute the values in your build, which makes it easy, transparent and consistent to add and change the values.
Read more →Lately, I’ve been busy learning more about creating serverless solutions. Because my main interest lies within the Microsoft Azure stack I surely had to check out the Azure Functions offering.
Azure Functions enable you to create a serverless solutions which are completely event-based. As it’s located within the Azure space, you can integrate easily with all of the other Azure services, like for example the service bus, Cosmos DB, storage, but also external services like SendGrid and GitHub!
Read more →There are dozens of blog posts, articles and books talking about microservices. Some of them talk about the design, other on how to implement and even others talk about why and when to use them.
This post will be a combination of them all. I won’t claim to be the all-time-expert on the matter, but I have read quite a bit on the subject, attended some talks and have had the honor to design (and implement) such a solution a couple of years ago.
Read more →It has become increasingly important to have your site secured via some kind of certificate. Even your Google ranking is affected by it.
The main problem with SSL/TLS certificates is the fact most of them cost money. Now, I don’t have any problem with paying some money for something like a certificate, but it will cost quite a lot if I want to set this up for all of my sites & domains.
Read more →I’ve just started setting up some continuous deployment for my personal websites. All of the sites are hosted within Azure App Services and the sources are located on either GitHub or BitBucket. By having the source code located on a public accessible repository (be it private or public), it’s rather easy to connect Azure to these locations.
On my day-job I come across a lot of web- and desktop applications which also need continuous integration and deployment steps in order for them to go live.
Read more →One of the reasons for me to create an Azure virtual network is being able to connect to my development machines in the Cloud from anywhere, without exposing them to the public. In order to do so, all machines have to be added to the virtual network. You also have to select the option to set up a point-to-site VPN connection to the virtual network.
Setting up a point-to-site VPN connection to an Azure virtual network is documented quite well on the Azure documentation pages.
Read more →Nowadays it’s possible to create virtual networks within your Azure subscription. This can be very useful for managing your Azure resources within a specific network or setting up a point-to-site or site-to-site connection to expand your current on-premise network.
To me creating a virtual network sounds like a great way to manage my virtual machines and services for development purposes which I’m running within Azure. It will also let me connect to them without exposing stuff to the public internet.
Read more →In my previous post I’ve described how to use Application Insights and use it within your new web application. Most of us aren’t working in a greenfield project, so new solutions have to be integrated with the old.
The project I’m working on uses log4net for logging messages, exceptions, etc. In order for us to use Application Insights, we had to search for a solution to integrate both. After having done some research on the subject we discovered this wasn’t a big problem.
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