Options to consider for SharePoint Framework solutions deployment

19th of October, 2018 / / No Comments

There are various options to package and deploy a SharePoint Framework solution and as part of packaging and deployment process, the developers have to identify a best approach for their team. Sometimes it becomes a nightmare to plan the right approach for your solution, if you haven’t weighed the options properly.

Working at multiple implementations of SPFx solution for sometime now, I have been able to get an idea of various options and approach for them.… [Keep reading] “Options to consider for SharePoint Framework solutions deployment”

Set up Accounts and secure passwords to run automation workloads in Azure Functions

5th of October, 2018 / / No Comments

In some of my previous blogs here, we have seen how we could use Azure Functions to to automate processes and SharePoint workloads.

Most of these jobs run using elevated or stored privileged accounts as the Azure Function is in a different context than the user context. There are various ways we could setup these accounts. Some of these approaches are below:

  1. Azure AD Service Accounts
    • Suitable for all operations
    • Need access to resource
    • Reusable across multiple workloads
  2. Azure AD Apps
    • Suitable for Graph Access
    • Need exact permissions set up
    • Might need Tenant Admin authentication
  3. SharePoint App Accounts
    • Suitable for SharePoint workloads.
… [Keep reading] “Set up Accounts and secure passwords to run automation workloads in Azure Functions”

Provisioning complex Modern Sites with Azure Functions and Flow – Part 3 – Post Provisioning Site Configuration

3rd of October, 2018 / / No Comments

In the previous two blogs part 1 and part 2, we looked at steps to create a Modern team site and apply a custom provisioning template to it. In this blog, we will have a look at the steps for the post provisioning process to implement site specific requirements. Some of them could be:

1. Apply default values to list fields
2. Create a bunch of default folders
3. Manage Security groups (SP level) and permission level.… [Keep reading] “Provisioning complex Modern Sites with Azure Functions and Flow – Part 3 – Post Provisioning Site Configuration”

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”

Azure Application Gateway WAF tuning

5th of September, 2018 / / 3 Comments

The Azure Application Gateway has a Web Application Firewall (WAF) capability that can be enabled on the gateway. The WAF will use the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set 3.0 by default and there is an option to use CRS 2.2.9.
CRS 3.0 offers reduced occurrences of false positives over 2.2.9 by default. However, there may still be times when you need to tune your WAF rule sets to avoid false positives in your site.

Blocked access to the site

The Azure WAF filters all incoming requests to the servers in the backend of the Application Gateway.… [Keep reading] “Azure Application Gateway WAF tuning”

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”

Provisioning complex Modern Sites with Azure Functions and Flow – Part 2 – Create and Apply Template

14th of August, 2018 / / 1 Comment

In the previous blog here, we got an overview of the high level Architecture of a Complex Modern team site provisioning process. In this blog, we will look at the step 1 of the process – Create and Apply template process, in detail.
Before that, below are few links to earlier blogs, as a refresher, to prerequisties for the blog.

  1. Set up a Graph App to call Graph Service using App ID and Secret – link
  2. Sequencing HTTP Trigger Azure Functions for simultaneous calls – link
  3. Adding and Updating owners using Microsoft Graph Async calls – link

Overview
The Create and Apply Template process aims at the following
1. … [Keep reading] “Provisioning complex Modern Sites with Azure Functions and Flow – Part 2 – Create and Apply Template”

Processing Azure Event Grid events across Azure subscriptions

11th of August, 2018 / / 2 Comments

Consider a scenario where you need to listen to Azure resource events happening in one Azure subscription from another Azure subscription. A use case for such a scenario can be when you are developing a solution where you listen to events happening in your customers’ Azure subscriptions, and then you need to handle those events from an Azure Function or Logic App running in your subscription.
A solution for such a scenario could be:
1. Create an Azure Function in your subscription that will handle Azure resource events received from Azure Event Grid.… [Keep reading] “Processing Azure Event Grid events across Azure subscriptions”

Hub-Spoke communication using vNet Peering and User Defined Routes

10th of August, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Introduction

Recently, I was working on a solution for a customer where they wanted to implement a Hub-Spoke virtual network topology that enabled the HUB to communicate with its Spoke networks via vNet Peering. They also required the SPOKE networks to be able to communicate with each other but peering between them was NOT allowed.
Drawing1
As we know, vNet peering is Non-Transitive – which means, even though SPOKE 1 is peered with the HUB network and the HUB is peered with SPOKE 2, this does not enable automatic communication between SPOKE 1 and SPOKE 2 unless they are exclusively peered which in our requirement we were not allowed to do.… [Keep reading] “Hub-Spoke communication using vNet Peering and User Defined Routes”

Provisioning complex Modern Sites with Azure Functions and Microsoft Flow – Part 1 – Architecture

10th of August, 2018 / / 3 Comments

In one of my previous blog here,  I have discussed about creating Office 365 groups using Azure Function and Flow. The same process could be used also to provision Modern Team sites in SharePoint Online because Modern Team Sites are Office 365 groups too. However, if you are creating a Complex Modern Team Site with lots of Libraries, Content types, Termstore associated columns etc. it will challenging to do it with a single Azure Function.… [Keep reading] “Provisioning complex Modern Sites with Azure Functions and Microsoft Flow – Part 1 – Architecture”