A few years ago, I was assigned on a project with a friend of mine, Marnix van Valen and we needed to update our APIs in API Management with the latest Open API schema for each release. As we don’t like to do this work manually, it got added to our build- and release pipeline. I like this approach, as it removes the need to host Swagger / Open API compute on my own service and only static files need to be hosted in some folder.
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Any now and then you have to make some major changes to the ARM templates of the project you’re working from. While this isn’t hard to do, it can become quite a time-intensive if you have to wait for the build/deployment server to pick up the changes and the actual deployment itself.
A faster way to test your changes is by using PowerShell or the Azure CLI to deploy your templates and see what happens.
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You might have noticed I’ve been doing quite a bit of stuff with ARM templates as of late. ARM templates are THE way to go if you want to deploy your Azure environment in a professional and repeatable fashion. Most of the time these templates get deployed in your Release pipeline to the Test, Acceptance or Production environment. Of course, I’ve set this up for all of my professional projects along with my side projects.
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I’m in the process of adding an ARM template to an open source project I’m contributing to. All of this was pretty straightforward, until I needed to add some secrets and connection strings to the project.
While it’s totally possible to integrate these secrets in your ARM parameter file or in your continuous deployment pipeline, I wanted to do something a bit more advanced and secure. Of course, Azure Key Vault comes to mind!
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Warming up your web applications and websites is something which we have been doing for quite some time now and will probably be doing for the next couple of years also. This warmup is necessary to ‘spin up’ your services, like the just-in-time compiler, your database context, caches, etc.
I’ve worked in several teams where we had solved the warming up of a web application in different ways. Running smoke-tests, pinging some endpoint on a regular basis, making sure the IIS application recycle timeout is set to infinite and some more creative solutions.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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