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”

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”

Monitoring Azure Storage Queues with Application Insights and Azure Monitor

7th of September, 2017 / / 9 Comments

Azure Queues provides an easy queuing system for cloud-based applications. Queues allow for loose coupling between application components, and applications that use queues can take advantage of features like peek-locking and multiple retry attempts to enable application resiliency and high availability. Additionally, when Azure Queues are used with Azure Functions or Azure WebJobs, the built-in poison queue support allows for messages that repeatedly fail processing attempts to be moved to a dedicated queue for later inspection.… [Keep reading] “Monitoring Azure Storage Queues with Application Insights and Azure Monitor”

Using Microsoft Azure Table Service REST API to collect data samples

9th of June, 2016 / / No Comments

Sometimes we need a simple solution that requires collecting data from multiple sources. The sources of data can be IoT devices or systems working on different platforms and in different places. Traditionally, integrators start thinking about implementation of a custom centralised REST API with some database repository. This solution can take days to implement and test, it is very expensive and requires hosting, maintenance, and support. However, in many cases, it is not needed at all.… [Keep reading] “Using Microsoft Azure Table Service REST API to collect data samples”