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 →

Using an Azure Managed Identity to authenticate on a different App Service

A couple of weeks ago, I was tasked to implement authentication between the services we have in our Azure landscape. I knew this can be done by using the Managed Identity, as we were doing this on a project I was involved with in the past. However, I had never actually done this myself. Most of the time the System Administrators were configuring everything and I just had to copy-paste some Guids in a configuration file. Read more →

Getting the group claims when authenticating with Azure Active Directory

I started working on some internal web applications for a customer. For these types of applications, it makes a lot of sense to use Azure Active Directory to authenticate users and use their AAD groups/roles to authorize them on specific pages. I wanted to authorize users by the AAD groups they are placed in. Some users can access Production data, while others are only allowed to access data from the Test environment, all based on the groups they are in. Read more →

Authentication of Microsoft Teams MessageCards actions in your API

Being able to create Message Cards or Actionable Messages in Microsoft Teams via a Logic App or an Azure Function is great. Especially if you can use this to invoke logic on your API and update the message in the Teams channel. However, you don’t want everyone to invoke a management API endpoint you’ve exposed to ‘do stuff’ in your cloud environment. Normally, you’d want to authenticate if the user pressing the button (read: invoking the endpoint). Read more →

Update your Microsoft Teams notifications via an Azure Function

In my latest post, I’ve shown you how you can use Azure Functions in your Microsoft Teams flow to handle errors in your environment. This stuff works great in a couple of projects I’ve worked on, but what would be even more awesome is to reply to a message in Teams when an action has completed after a button is pressed. Well, replying & modifying the original message with a status update is quite possible and I’ll show you how in this post. Read more →