My notes for passing the AZ-300 and AZ-301 exams

A couple of weeks ago I’ve passed both the AZ-300 and AZ-301 exams. You’re required to pass both of these exams in to get the Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification. After posting a tweet I got a lot of responses asking if I had any pointers on what to learn. Instead of responding to each person individually it makes more sense to share what I’ve used to study and hopefully it’s helpful to others also. Read more →

Doing your DevOps stuff with Azure Functions instead of Logic Apps

So, a couple of weeks back I wrote about leveraging the power of Logic Apps to retrieve Alerts from within your Azure ecosystem and send them to Microsoft Teams. This works great and a fellow Azure MVP, Tom Kerkhove, has enhanced the Logic Apps Template when handling Azure Monitor events.I’m starting to become a pretty big van of Logic Apps, but there are some (obvious) downsides to it. First, they live inside your Azure Portal. Read more →

DevOps easier with Logic Apps and Teams

I’ve written about empowering your Teams with Azure Functions a while back, but this isn’t the only way to create value. You can also use Azure Logic Apps. Logic Apps are a way to express powerful integrations with (several different) systems in a visual workflow based way. It has a lot of similarities with other (Microsoft) workflow systems from the past, so it should strike very familiar to most (Enterprise) developers. Read more →

Using Azure Functions to empower your Teams

In today’s world we’re receiving an enormous amount of e-mail. A lot of the e-mail I’m receiving during the day (and night) is about errors happening in our cloud environment and sometimes someone needs to follow up on this. At the moment this is a real pain because there’s a lot of false-positives in those e-mails due to the lack of configuration and possibilities in our monitoring software. The amount of e-mails is so painful, most of us have created email rules so these monitoring emails ‘go away’ and we only check them once per day. Read more →

Create your own custom bindings with Azure Functions

The default Azure Functions runtime comes with quite a lot of bindings and triggers which enable you to create a highly scalable solution within the Azure environment. You can connect to service buses, storage accounts, Event Grid, Cosmos DB, HTTP calls, etc. However, sometimes this isn’t enough. That’s why the Azure Functions team has released functionality which enables you to create your own custom bindings. This should make it easy for you to read and write data to any service or location you need to, even if it’s not supported out of the box. Read more →