Showing all posts tagged: 'Azure'

A 66-post collection

Deploying Azure Functions with ARM templates and the Kudu REST API

This approach is by far my preferred and favourite. Ok, it's not perfect but I believe that it provides the most open source, versatile and flexible way to deploy your functions using any tool and any platform. This one does not require you to install any special tools other than the Azure CLI on your build server. In this step, rather than trying to do everything from one file, i.e. the ARM template, I decided to go with the 2 step approach: Deploy the ARM template with the Application Service and Function(s) structure Deploy the Function(s) code. …[read more]

DevOps with Azure Functions - a holistic approach

Azure Functions is Microsoft's answer the serverless architecture. They are very popular due to the incredible integration they provide with Azure Services, SaaS providers and on-premise application. It definitely drives the whole microservice architecture design which is built on top of Azure's established Platform-as-a-Service. And enables developers to think about APIs and integration in a totally different way - serverless (even though there are still servers under the hood). It's even more exciting seeing so many organisations embarking in larger scale projects that take advantage of Functions and LogicApps. If you want to know more about the whole serverless design, …[read more]

Install and run the Azure CLI on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSFL)

I've [blogged before](GHOST_URL/working-with-bash-on-ubuntu-on-windows-10/" target="_blank) about the tremendous work that the Windows team has done to bring a truly integrated Linux subsystem on Windows 10. That's right, you can use the native Linux (user and kernel modes) inside Windows without the need of a VM, Container or any other emulator. This has opened up so many possibilities and brings a very powerful tool to Windows. Using native Bash is a dream come true for many people and even me, whose use of it is limited to 0.05% of its true capabilities!!! Do I care? …[read more]

Invoke Azure LogicApp over HTTPS with HTTP triggers

Ah [LogicApps](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service-logic/app-service-logic-what-are-logic-apps" target=_blank), the IFTT of Azure, the very young and lightweight "cousin" of Microsoft BizTalk. LogicApps is a great integration and workflow service that works great not only with Azure services but also with many SaaS products and 3rd party services. Think of LogicApps as a tool that you attach connectors to communicate with various components (sFTP, blob storage, email, Twitter etc) and grab data that you can manipulate or pass directly to another service. What I described here is IFTT but for enterprises with scalability, performance …[read more]

List all RBAC permissions for all resources in Azure

I wanted to figure out how to obtain a list of all Resource Based Access Control[RBAC](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/role-based-access-control-configure" target="_blank) permissions for all the resources in one of my Azure subscription. This is a great way for Azure administrators to run reports that can quickly identify any issues with wrongly assigned permissions. To do this quickly and efficiently while automating the whole process I'll use PowerShell. The PoSH script is fairly straightforward and only requires a few steps: Login to Azure Select the right subscription (optional, if more than one) Retrieve …[read more]

Working with the Azure DocumentDB REST API Authorization headers

[DocumentDB](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/documentdb/" target="_blank) is Azure's NoSQL offering that provides an exception service when it comes to working with non relational data. I've recently had a request to work on a project that uses DocumentDB but relies solely on the REST API to interact with the service. This is absolutely fine, since every service on Azure is built on top of a corresponding REST Api. Even the SDKs seem to be thin wrappers around the REST Api hiding away all the "ugliness" and complexity. Why did I say ugliness and …[read more]

Service Principals in Microsoft Azure

What is a service principal? Azure has a notion of a Service Principal which, in simple terms, is a service account. On Windows and Linux, this is equivalent to a service account. These accounts are frequently used to run a specific scheduled task, web application pool or even SQL Server service. In a cloud context, Service Principals are the new paradigm. They are great because they allow you to provision an account that only has enough permissions and scope to run a task within a predefined set of Azure resource. It is vital that you don’t use your own …[read more]

The new Azure Management Fluent API has landed

Hello friends. Did you hear the news? Did you read the announcement? There's a new [awesome] Azure Management Fluent API for C#. The [announcement](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/simpler-azure-management-libraries-for-net/" target="_blank) went out today and as soon as I saw it I knew I had to give it a try! But first, let's see what the team had to say about the release: One C# statement to authenticate. One statement to create a virtual machine. One statement to modify an existing virtual network, etc. No more guessing about what is required vs. optional vs. non-modifiable. And …[read more]