Automatic Key Rotation for Azure Services

19th of September, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Securely managing keys for services that we use is an important, and sometimes difficult, part of building and running a cloud-based application. In general I prefer not to handle keys at all, and instead rely on approaches like managed service identities with role-based access control, which allow for applications to authenticate and authorise themselves without any keys being explicitly exchanged. However, there are a number of situations where do we need to use and manage keys, such as when we use services that don’t support role-based access control.… [Keep reading] “Automatic Key Rotation for Azure Services”

Deploying Azure Functions with ARM Templates

16th of August, 2018 / / 1 Comment

There are many different ways in which an Azure Function can be deployed. In a future blog post I plan to go through the whole list. There is one deployment method that isn’t commonly known though, and it’s of particular interest to those of us who use ARM templates to deploy our Azure infrastructure. Before I describe it, I’ll quickly recap ARM templates.

ARM Templates

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are JSON files that describe the state of a resource group.… [Keep reading] “Deploying Azure Functions with ARM Templates”

Deploying Blob Containers with ARM Templates

2nd of August, 2018 / / 2 Comments

ARM templates are a great way to programmatically deploy your Azure resources. They act as declarative descriptions of the desired state of an Azure resource group, and while they can be frustrating to work with, overall the ability to use templates to deploy your Azure resources provides a lot of value.

One common frustration with ARM templates is that certain resource types simply can’t be deployed with them. Until recently, one such resource type was a blob container.… [Keep reading] “Deploying Blob Containers with ARM Templates”

Avoiding Cosmos DB Bill Shock with Azure Functions

24th of July, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Cosmos DB is a fantastic database service for many different types of applications. But it can also be quite expensive, especially if you have a number of instances of your database to maintain. For example, in some enterprise development teams you may need to have dev, test, UAT, staging, and production instances of your application and its components. Assuming you’re following best practices and keeping these isolated from each other, that means you’re running at least five Cosmos DB collections.… [Keep reading] “Avoiding Cosmos DB Bill Shock with Azure Functions”

Demystifying Managed Service Identities on Azure

13th of April, 2018 / / 5 Comments

Managed service identities (MSIs) are a great feature of Azure that are being gradually enabled on a number of different resource types. But when I’m talking to developers, operations engineers, and other Azure customers, I often find that there is some confusion and uncertainty about what they do. In this post I will explain what MSIs are and are not, where they make sense to use, and give some general advice on how to work with them.… [Keep reading] “Demystifying Managed Service Identities on Azure”

Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 6: Build and Deployment

20th of February, 2018 / / No Comments

So far in this series we’ve been compiling our server-side TypeScript code to JavaScript locally on our own machines, and then copying and pasting it into the Azure Portal. However, an important part of building a modern application – especially a cloud-based one – is having a reliable automated build and deployment process. There are a number of reasons why this is important, ranging from ensuring that a developer isn’t building code on their own machine – and therefore may be subject to environmental variations or differences that cause different outputs – through to running a suite of tests on every build and release.… [Keep reading] “Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 6: Build and Deployment”

Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 5: Unit Testing

13th of February, 2018 / / 4 Comments

Over the last four parts of this series, we’ve discussed how we can write server-side code for Cosmos DB, and the types of situations where it makes sense to do so. If you’re building a small sample application, you now have enough knowledge to go and build out UDFs, stored procedures, and triggers. But if you’re writing production-grade applications, there are two other major topics that need discussion: how to unit test your server-side code, and how to build and deploy it to Cosmos DB in an automated and predictable manner.… [Keep reading] “Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 5: Unit Testing”

Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 4: Triggers

30th of January, 2018 / / 7 Comments

scTriggers are the third type of server-side code in Cosmos DB. Triggers allow for logic to be run while an operation is running on a document. When a document is to be created, modified, or deleted, our custom logic can be executed – either before or after the operation takes place – allowing us to validate documents, transform documents, and even create secondary documents or perform other operations on the collection. As with stored procedures, this all takes place within the scope of an implicit transaction.… [Keep reading] “Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 4: Triggers”

Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 3: Stored Procedures

19th of January, 2018 / / 6 Comments

Stored procedures, the second type of server-side code that can run within Cosmos DB, provide the ability to execute blocks of functionality from inside the database engine. Typically we use stored procedures for discrete tasks that can be encapsulated within a single invocation. In this post, we will discuss some situations where stored procedures can be used and the actions and queries that they can perform. We’ll then start to work through the server-side API model, and look at how we can work with the incoming stored procedure invocation’s request and response as well as the Cosmos DB collection itself.… [Keep reading] “Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 3: Stored Procedures”

Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 2: User-Defined Functions

12th of January, 2018 / / No Comments

User-defined functions (UDFs) in Cosmos DB allow for simple calculations and computations to be performed on values, entities, and documents. In this post I will introduce UDFs, and then provide detailed steps to set up a basic UDF written in TypeScript. Many of these same steps will be applicable to stored procedures and triggers, which we’ll look at in future posts.

This is the second part of a series of blog posts on server-side development using Cosmos DB with TypeScript.… [Keep reading] “Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 2: User-Defined Functions”