Using AzCopy with Azure Virtual Machines Managed Identity

10th of July, 2019 / / No Comments

The Managed Identities for Azure Resources feature is a free service with Azure Active Directory. Formerly known as Managed Service Identity, Managed Identities for Azure Resources first appeared in services such as Azure Functions a couple of years ago. Much more recent though Azure Copy (AzCopy) now supports Azure Virtual Machines Managed Identity. This negates the need to get and manage SAS keys or certificates, and even the need for installing and leveraging the AzureRM or AzRM PowerShell modules.… [Keep reading] “Using AzCopy with Azure Virtual Machines Managed Identity”

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”

Protecting Application Credentials when implementing Modular Azure Functions with Microsoft Flow

23rd of April, 2018 / / 1 Comment

This weekend I was attempting to rework some older Azure Automation tasks I wrote some time ago that were a combination of PowerShell scripts and Azure (PowerShell Functions). I was looking to leverage Microsoft Flow so that I could have them handy as ‘Buttons’ in the Microsoft Flow mobile app.
Quite quickly I realized that Microsoft Flow didn’t have the capability to perform some of the automation I required, so I handed that off to an Azure Function.… [Keep reading] “Protecting Application Credentials when implementing Modular Azure Functions with Microsoft Flow”

Demystifying Managed Service Identities on Azure

13th of April, 2018 / / 5 Comments

Managed service identities (MSIs) are a great feature of Azure that are being gradually enabled on a number of different resource types. But when I’m talking to developers, operations engineers, and other Azure customers, I often find that there is some confusion and uncertainty about what they do. In this post I will explain what MSIs are and are not, where they make sense to use, and give some general advice on how to work with them.… [Keep reading] “Demystifying Managed Service Identities on Azure”

Enabling and using Managed Service Identity to access an Azure Key Vault with Azure PowerShell Functions

19th of September, 2017 / / 4 Comments

Introduction

At the end of last week (14 Sept 2017) Microsoft announced a new Azure Active Directory feature – Managed Service Identity. Managed Service Identity helps solve the chicken and egg bootstrap problem of needing credentials to connect to the Azure Key Vault to retrieve credentials. When used in conjunction with Virtual Machines, Web Apps and Azure Functions that meant having to implement methods to obfuscate credentials that were stored within them. I touched on one method that I’ve used a lot in this post here whereby I encrypt the credential and store it in the Application Settings, but it still required a keyfile to allow reversing of the encryption as part of the automation process.… [Keep reading] “Enabling and using Managed Service Identity to access an Azure Key Vault with Azure PowerShell Functions”