Automating Azure Instrumentation and Monitoring – Part 1: Introduction

14th of November, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Instrumentation and monitoring is a critical part of managing any application or system. By proactively monitoring the health of the system as a whole, as well as each of its components, we can mitigate potential issues before they affect customers. And if issues do occur, good instrumentation alerts us to that fact so that we can respond quickly.

Azure provides a set of powerful monitoring and instrumentation tools to instrument almost all Azure services as well as our own applications.… [Keep reading] “Automating Azure Instrumentation and Monitoring – Part 1: Introduction”

Integration Testing Precompiled v2 Azure Functions

8th of November, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Azure Functions code can often contain important functionality that needs to be tested. The two most common ways of testing code are unit testing and integration testing. Unit testing runs pieces of code in isolation, and this is relatively simple to do with Azure Functions. Integration testing can be a little trickier though, and I haven’t found any good documentation about how do this with version 2 of the Functions runtime. In this post I’ll outline the approach I’m using to run integration tests against my Azure Functions v2 code.… [Keep reading] “Integration Testing Precompiled v2 Azure Functions”

Creating Azure Storage SAS Tokens with ARM Templates

7th of November, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Shared access signatures, sometimes also called SAS tokens, allow for delegating access to a designated part of an Azure resource with a defined set of permissions. They can be used to allow various types of access to your Azure services while keeping your access keys secret.

In a recent update to Azure Resource Manager, Microsoft has added the ability to create SAS tokens from ARM templates. While this is a general-purpose feature that will hopefully work across a multitude of Azure services, for now it only seems to work with Azure Storage (at least of the services I’ve checked).… [Keep reading] “Creating Azure Storage SAS Tokens with ARM Templates”

Deploying App Services with ‘Run From Package’, Azure Storage, and Azure Pipelines

6th of November, 2018 / / 2 Comments

Azure App Service recently introduced a feature called Run From Package. Rather than uploading our application binaries and other files to an App Service directly, we can instead package them into a zip file and provide App Services with the URL. This is a useful feature because it eliminates issues with file locking during deployments, it allows for atomic updates of application code, and it reduces the time required to boot an application. It also means that the ‘release’ of an application simply involves the deployment of a configuration setting.… [Keep reading] “Deploying App Services with ‘Run From Package’, Azure Storage, and Azure Pipelines”

Building deployment pipelines for Azure Function proxies and Logic Apps

5th of November, 2018 / / No Comments

Azure Logic Apps offer a great set of tools to rapidly build APIs and leverage your existing assets through a variety of connectors. Whether in a more ad-hoc scenario or in a well-designed micro service architecture, it’s always a good way to introduce some form of decoupling through the mediator pattern. If you don’t have the budget for a full blown API Management rollout and your requirements don’t extend further than a basic proxy as a mediator, keep on reading.… [Keep reading] “Building deployment pipelines for Azure Function proxies and Logic Apps”

Dependency Injection In Azure Functions V2

31st of October, 2018 / / No Comments

With the Azure Functions v2 runtime, supporting .NET Core it has become easier to do dependency injection. It can be done in a similar way that ASP.NET Core does via Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection.

ASP.NET Core encourages the use of dependency injection by the built-in DI container. This feature of ASP.NET Core is very handy as many extensions such as logging and configuration via IOptions pattern are registered using during startup in Startup.cs. ASP.NET Core registers these services, along with any custom services you need using the built-in DI container via IServiceCollection.… [Keep reading] “Dependency Injection In Azure Functions V2”

Step-by-step: Using Azure DevOps Services to deploy ARM templates with CI/ CD – Part 2

25th of October, 2018 / / 3 Comments

In this blog (Part 2), I take you through on Enabling Continuous Integration (CI) / Continuous Deployment (CD), for the project created on Part 1.

To re-cap, I have made this entire post into two parts for easier understanding and we will focus on Part 2 here:

Part 1- Creating your first project in Azure DevOps (https://blog.kloud.com.au/2018/10/17/step-by-step-using-azure-devops-services-to-deploy-arm-templates-with-ci-cd-part-1/).
Part 2 – Enabling the first project in Azure DevOps for Continuous Integration (CI) / Continuous Deployment (CD).

Enabling the first project in Azure DevOps for Continuous Integration

    • Now, the next step is to enable continuous integration.
… [Keep reading] “Step-by-step: Using Azure DevOps Services to deploy ARM templates with CI/ CD – Part 2”

Translating JSON messages with Logic Apps

22nd of October, 2018 / / 2 Comments

One of the key components of an integration platform is message translation. The Microsoft Azure iPaaS Logic Apps service offers message translation with the out of the box ‘compose’ operation. Alternatively, message translation can be achieved with Liquid transforms. The latter requires an Azure Integration account which comes with additional cost. In this article we’ll look at the two transformation options and do a comparison in terms of cost, performance and usability. For my demo purposes I created two logic apps with HTTP input triggers and response output.… [Keep reading] “Translating JSON messages with Logic Apps”

Address Space maintenance with VNet Peering

19th of October, 2018 / / No Comments

I recently had a scenario where I wanted to add an address space to a Virtual Network and encountered an issue where it was not possible to modify the address space while VNet Peering was in use. This is likely due to the fact that the routes to the peered VNet that are applied through the peering only get updated at the time the peer is created and cannot be dynamically updated.

The following error detailed this.… [Keep reading] “Address Space maintenance with VNet Peering”