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”

Azure ExpressRoute Public and Microsoft peering changes, notes from the field

27th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

I’ve been trying to piece all this together and get a single, concise blog post that covers all bases around the changes that have happened and are going to be happening for Microsoft ExpressRoute peering. That’s been a bit of a challenge because, I hope I don’t harp on this too much, but, communication could be a bit better from the product group team. With that said, though, it’s no secret for those that use ExpressRoute, Microsoft is looking to simply it’s configuration.… [Keep reading] “Azure ExpressRoute Public and Microsoft peering changes, notes from the field”

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”

Power BI: Using anonymous authentication on Web data sources with a API key in URL

23rd of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Currently, there are some challenges on Power BI service when trying to Schedule Refresh from a Web API data source that uses an API key for authentication. On this post, I will talk about a way to work around this problem by using an Azure Functions Proxy. The proxy will be used the override the request to the Web API and successfully use anonymous authentication.

Scenario overview

I have some reports on Power BI that get the data from WorkflowMax API, they have been published on Power BI service and embedded on SharePoint Online.… [Keep reading] “Power BI: Using anonymous authentication on Web data sources with a API key in URL”

Why is the Azure Load Balancer NOT working?

12th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Context

For most workloads that I’ve deployed in Azure that have required load balancing, for the Azure Load Balancer (ALB) used in those architectures, the out of the box experience or the default configuration was used. The load balancer service is great like that, whereby for the majority of scenarios it just works out of the box. I’m sure this isn’t an Azure only experience either. The other public cloud providers have a great out of the box load balancing service that would work with just about any service without in depth configuration.… [Keep reading] “Why is the Azure Load Balancer NOT working?”

Bots: An Understanding of Time

9th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Some modern applications must understand time, because the messages they receive contain time sensitive information. Consider a modern Service Desk solution, that may have to retrieve tickets based on a date range (the span between dates) or a duration of time.
In this blog post, I’ll explain how bots can interpret date ranges and durations, so they can respond to natural language queries provided by users, either via keyboard or microphone.
First, let’s consider  the building blocks of a bot, as depicted in the following view:

The client runs an application that sends messages to a messaging endpoint in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Bots: An Understanding of Time”

Querying against an Azure SQL Database using Azure Automation Part 1

5th of July, 2018 / / 1 Comment

What if you wanted to leverage Azure automation to analyse database entries and send some statistics or even reports on a daily or weekly basis?
Well why would you want to do that?

  • On demand compute:
    • You may not have access to a physical server. Or your computer isn’t powerful enough to handle huge data processing. Or you would definitely do not want to wait in the office for the task to complete before leaving on a Friday evening.
… [Keep reading] “Querying against an Azure SQL Database using Azure Automation Part 1”

PowerShell gotcha when connecting ASM Classic VNETs to ARM ExpressRoute

5th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Recently I was working on an Azure ExpressRoute configuration change that required an uplift from a 1GB circuit to a 10Gb circuit. Now thats nothing interesting, but, of note was using some PowerShell to execute a cmdlet.
A bit of a back story to set the scene here; and I promise it will be brief.
You can no longer provision Azure ExpressRoute circuits in the Classic or ASM deployment model. All ExpressRoute circuits that are provisioned now are indeed Azure Resource Manager (ASM) deployments.… [Keep reading] “PowerShell gotcha when connecting ASM Classic VNETs to ARM ExpressRoute”

Securing your Web front-end with Azure Application Gateway Part 2

4th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

In part one of this post we looked at configuring an Azure Application Gateway to secure your web application front-end, it is available here.
In part two we will be looking at some additional post configuration tasks and how to start investigating whether the WAF is blocking any of our application traffic and how to check for this.
First up we will look at configuring some NSG (Network Security Group) inbound and outbound rules for the subnet that the Application Gateway is deployed within.… [Keep reading] “Securing your Web front-end with Azure Application Gateway Part 2”

Securing your Web front-end with Azure Application Gateway Part 1

3rd of July, 2018 / / 2 Comments

I have just completed a project with a customer who were using Azure Application Gateway to secure their web front-end and thought it would be good to post some findings.
This is part one in a two part post looking at how to secure a web front-end using Azure Application Gateway with the WAF component enabled. In this post I will explain the process for configuring the Application Gateway once deployed. You can deploy the Application Gateway from an ARM Template, Azure PowerShell or the portal.… [Keep reading] “Securing your Web front-end with Azure Application Gateway Part 1”