Azure Functions Logging to Application Insights

20th of June, 2017 / / No Comments

We’re going to have a look at several ways to integrate Application Insights (AppInsights) with Azure Functions (Functions).
Functions supports built-in logging features using TraceWriter instance. Basic sample function might look like:

With TraceWriter, we can log information to the log console like:

However, it has the maximum limit of 1000 records. This is good for simple debugging purposes, but not for logging. Therefore, we should store logs somewhere like database or storage.… [Keep reading] “Azure Functions Logging to Application Insights”

Integration of Microsoft Identity Manager with Azure Platform-as-a-Service Services

14th of June, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Overview

This isn’t an out of the box solution. This is a bespoke solution that takes a number of elements and puts them together in a unique way. I’m not expecting anyone to implement this specific solution (but you’re more than welcome to) but to take inspiration from it to implement solutions relevant to your environment(s). This post supports a presentation I did to The MIM Team User Group on 14 June 2017.
This post describes a solution that;

  • Leverages an Azure WebApp (NodeJS) to present a simple website.
… [Keep reading] “Integration of Microsoft Identity Manager with Azure Platform-as-a-Service Services”

Azure Functions with Swagger

13th of June, 2017 / / 4 Comments

Azure Functions Team has recently announced the Swagger support as a preview. If we use Azure Functions as APIs, this will be very useful. In this post, we will have a look how to enable Swagger support on Azure Functions.

Sample codes used for this post can be found here.

Sample Azure Functions Instance

First of all, with the sample code provided, we’re creating two HTTP triggers, CreateProduct and GetProduct. Once we deploy them, we can find it from the Azure Portal like:

Here are simple requests and responses through Postman:


Let’s create a Swagger definition document for those Functions.… [Keep reading] “Azure Functions with Swagger”

Message retry patterns in Azure Functions

22nd of May, 2017 / / 3 Comments

Azure Functions provide ServiceBus based trigger bindings that allow us to process messages dropped onto a SB queue or delivered to a SB subscription. In this post we’ll walk through creating an Azure Function using a ServiceBus trigger that implements a configurable message retry pattern.
Note: This post is not an introduction to Azure Functions nor an introduction to ServiceBus. For those not familiar will these Azure services take a look at the Azure Documentation Centre.… [Keep reading] “Message retry patterns in Azure Functions”

Know Your Cloud Resource Costs on Azure

5th of May, 2017 / / No Comments

An organisation used to invest their IT infrastructure mostly for computers, network or data centre. Over time, they spent their budget for hosting spaces. Nowadays, in cloud environments, they mostly spend their funds to purchase computing power. Here’s a simple diagram about the cloud computing evolution. From left to right, expenditure shifts from infrastructure to computing power.

In the cloud environment, when we need resources, we just create and use them, and when we don’t need them any longer, we just delete them.… [Keep reading] “Know Your Cloud Resource Costs on Azure”

Precompiled Azure Functions Revisited

3rd of May, 2017 / / No Comments

Since Microsoft released a preview version of Visual Studio Tools for Azure Functions in December, 2016, it’s been reported very buggy. Current roadmap says the tooling won’t be unveiled until .NET Standard 2.0 is released. Therefore, Azure App Service Team published an article to utilise ASP.NET Web Application projects in the meantime. Even though the approach requires a lot of hands for initial setup, this is literally the only way to play Azure Functions on Visual Studio without the tooling.… [Keep reading] “Precompiled Azure Functions Revisited”

Calling WCF client proxies in Azure Functions

17th of April, 2017 / / 2 Comments

Azure Functions allow developers to write discrete units of work and run these without having to deal with hosting or application infrastructure concerns. Azure Functions are Microsoft’s answer to server-less computing on the Azure Platform and together with Azure ServiceBus, Azure Logic Apps, Azure API Management (to name just a few) has become an essential part of the Azure iPaaS offering.

The problem

Integration solutions often require connecting legacy systems using deprecating protocols such as SOAP and WS-*.… [Keep reading] “Calling WCF client proxies in Azure Functions”

Automate the nightly backup of your Development FIM/MIM Sync and Portal Servers Configuration

31st of January, 2017 / / 6 Comments

Last week in a customer development environment I had one of those oh shit moments where I thought I’d lost a couple of weeks of work. A couple of weeks of development around multiple Management Agents, MV Schema changes etc. Luckily for me I was just connecting to an older VM Image, but it got me thinking. It would be nice to have an automated process that each night would;

  • Export each Management Agent on a FIM/MIM Sync Server
  • Export the FIM/MIM Synchronisation Server Configuration
  • Take a copy of the Extensions Folder (where I keep my PowerShell Management Agents scripts)
  • Export the FIM/MIM Service Server Configuration

And that is what this post covers.… [Keep reading] “Automate the nightly backup of your Development FIM/MIM Sync and Portal Servers Configuration”

Integrating Microsoft Flow with Azure Functions for Non-IT People

27th of January, 2017 / / No Comments

Microsoft Flow (Flow) creates automated workflows between various apps and services so that users can get notifications, collect data and more. This is similar to Azure Logic Apps (Logic Apps), but has different target audiences such as marketing, sales or all other non-IT related people. This document provides high-level comparisons between Flow, Logic Apps and Azure Functions.
Flow contains comprehensive number of pre-defined workflows called templates so we can just simply choose one of them, provide necessary information and use it.… [Keep reading] “Integrating Microsoft Flow with Azure Functions for Non-IT People”

Testing Precompiled Azure Functions

20th of January, 2017 / / No Comments

Azure Functions has recently added a new feature that allows precompiled assembly to run functions. This gives us a great confidence with regards to unit testing. In this post, we are walking through how to unit test functions with ease, like which we do tests everyday.

The sample code used in this post can be found at HERE.

Function without Dependency

We’re not digging down precompiled function too much as it’s on the document.… [Keep reading] “Testing Precompiled Azure Functions”