Using MSI with Azure Functions and Key Vault

There’s a relative new feature available in Azure called Managed Service Identity. What it does is create an identity for a service instance in the Azure AD tenant, which in its turn can be used to access other resources within Azure. This is a great feature, because now you don’t have to maintain and create identities for your applications by yourself anymore. All of this management is handled for you when using a System Assigned Identity. Read more →

Using log4net in your Azure Functions

As I mentioned in my earlier post, there are 2 options available to you out of the box for logging. You can either use the TraceWriter or the ILogger. While this is fine when you are doing some small projects or Functions, it can become a problem if you want your Azure Functions to reuse earlier developed logic or modules used in different projects, a Web API for example. In these shared class libraries you are probably leveraging the power of a ‘full-blown’ logging library. Read more →

First steps into logging of your Azure Functions

Creating a solution with multiple small services is great of course. It provides you with a lot of flexibility and scalability. There are however a couple of things you have to think about when designing and developing a solution with multiple services. One of the things you need to figure out is how to implement proper logging. For an actual production system you need to have this in place in order to monitor and debug the overall solution. Read more →

Move Up with Azure

In a couple of weeks, on the 22nd of February, I’ll be talking at a free event organized by 4DotNet and SnelStart called Move Up with Azure. I’m not the only one who will be speaking over there, there’s also a great session by Henry Been (SnelStart) and an awesome talk from Christos Matskas (Microsoft). I myself will be talking on how to create a serverless solution using Azure Functions. This of course is a very broad subject and I’d like to know what you think I should focus on or what you would like to see covered in this session? Read more →

Loading certificates with Azure Functions

Using certificates to secure, sign and validate information has become a common practice in the past couple of years. Therefore, it makes sense to use them in combination with Azure Functions as well. As Azure Functions are hosted on top of an Azure App Service this is quite possible, but you do have to configure something before you can start using certificates. Adding your certificate to the Function App Let’s just start at the beginning, in case you are wondering on how to add these certificates to your Function App. Read more →