Beer Styles Added to Azure Table Service.PNG

Leveraging the Azure Functions Table Storage Output Binding with PowerShell

17th of April, 2019 / / 2 Comments

Recently I wrote this post on using PowerShell to bulk load data into Azure Table Service. Whilst this method works great it does rely on the AzureRM PowerShell module to provide the ability to batch ingest data into Azure Table Service.

I’m working on a solution that requires levels of automation to obtain data from events from Microsoft Graph and ingest that data into Azure Table Service. That doesn’t work with the AzureRM PowerShell Module.

Azure Functions provide additional Bindings for Input and Output, but I’d never had the need to spend the time working it out how to output to Azure Table Storage (with PowerShell).… [Keep reading] “Leveraging the Azure Functions Table Storage Output Binding with PowerShell”

Quality of life user experience improvements to SharePoint Online through the use of 301 redirects and Azure App Service

12th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

Originally posted on Lucian.Blog. Follow Lucian on Twitter, @LucianFrango.

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This is the third time in the last year that I’ve had to setup a HTTP 301 redirect in Azure for a customer.Doing so improves the general quality of life experience for users accessing various Microsoft 365 services, like for example specific SharePoint Online team sites, or Exchange Online OWA.

With each implementation I turned to Azure App Service to deliver the functionality needed.… [Keep reading] “Quality of life user experience improvements to SharePoint Online through the use of 301 redirects and Azure App Service”

Low-Cost Rate Limiting for Azure Functions APIs with API Management’s Consumption Tier

6th of December, 2018 / / No Comments

Azure Functions can be used as a lightweight platform for building APIs. They support a number of helpful features for API developers including custom routes and a variety of output bindings that can implement complex business rules. They also have a consumption-based pricing model, which provides a low-cost, pay-per-use pricing model while you have low levels of traffic, but can scale or burst for higher levels of demand.

The Azure Functions platform also provides Azure Functions Proxies, which gives another set of features to further extend APIs built on top of Azure Functions.… [Keep reading] “Low-Cost Rate Limiting for Azure Functions APIs with API Management’s Consumption Tier”

Integration Testing Timer-Triggered Precompiled v2 Azure Functions

3rd of December, 2018 / / No Comments

In a recent post, I described a way to run integration tests against precompiled C# Azure Functions using the v2 runtime. In that post, we looked at an example of invoking an HTTP-triggered function from within an integration test.

Of course, there are plenty of other triggers available for Azure Functions too. Recently I needed to write an integration test against a timer-triggered function and decided to investigate the best way to do this.

The Azure Functions runtime provides a convenient API for invoking a timer-trigger function.… [Keep reading] “Integration Testing Timer-Triggered Precompiled v2 Azure Functions”

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”

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”

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”

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”

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”