Because Developers are Awesome - page 5

Build a Blog: Set up DNS in Azure

June 06, 2024 4 minute read

Today, I’m continuing on the job of setting up a new blog. I’ve now got three blog posts, so that’s enough for me to consider what I need to do for production. I don’t have a domain yet, so this post is all about setting up the domain. This post is part of a sequence showing how to deploy a blog on Azure Static Web Apps: Deploying Azure Static Web Apps Configuring Azure DNS Configuring Static Web Apps Custom Domains Taking Static Web Apps to Production Step 1: Pick a name Wh...

Build a Blog: Deploy Azure Infrastructure three ways

June 05, 2024 16 minute read

For most developers, dealing with the infrastructure part of the job is hard. I like to say “give me a database and a web site” and prefer not to get into the other requirements like DNS, security, and multi-region reliability. My web sites and other cloud projects (including this one) are pretty open. So, what’s the minimum I need to know to deploy stuff on Azure? How can I get my project deployed on Azure for development with the minimum of hassle? This post is part of a sequence show...

Dev containers are a developers best friend

June 04, 2024 6 minute read

If you’ve ever had to rebuild or significantly upgrade your machine in the middle of a project, then you will recognize the pain. You find that some versions of your favorite tools have changed, or you don’t remember the specific build command or tool download location for that one thing you rely on. Dev containers was designed with this in mind. It’s the technology behind Codespaces and supported in Visual Studio Code. In this tutorial, I’ll walk through the steps to create your own dev ...

Create an App Registration for RBAC with PowerShell and Microsoft Graph.

January 19, 2024 5 minute read

I’m currently working on some automation within Azure to deploy a hub-spoke web application. This web application authenticates with Entra ID using an App Registration and Role-Based Access Controls (RBAS) using App Roles. So, I need to create an app registration, enterprise app, and create the app roles. Seems easy, right? Get an access token Since this is part of a deployment, I’m going to assume the user has already connected to Azure using Connect-AzAccount and selected a subscriptio...

Deleting Azure resources the right way.

July 12, 2023 3 minute read

If you are an Azure developer, you likely spin up an application, do some work, then shut it down again. However, shutting down resources and deleting them has an order to them. If your service is network isolated (in a virtual network), then you can’t delete the application until the private endpoints are shut down. Budgets don’t get deleted with the resource group. Diagnostic settings can’t be deleted if the resource no longer exists. There is an order you should do things: Private...

Purge Azure API Management soft-deleted services with ease.

January 20, 2023 4 minute read

I work a lot with Azure API Management, which means I turn up and down services quite a few times a day. Azure API Management has an awesome feature that prevents you from accidentally deleting a service, called soft-delete. Instead of immediately deleting the service, it marks it as soft deleted and purges it later on. Unfortunately, that means that you can’t immediately reuse that service name. In production, this is a great thing to have. In development, it turns into a pain. That’s b...

Type-checking Bicep arrays and objects

November 28, 2022 3 minute read

As you may have guessed by now, I’m delving heavily into the world of Bicep right now, mostly in order to describe the infrastructure for my personal projects in a readable way. JSON and YAML (used by ARM) is most definitely not readable for the average consumer. Part of that work was learning about bicep modules, which I love for modularizing my code. However, there is one distinctive problem with this. Let’s take an example to show off the problem. I have a bicep fragment that looks li...

Bicep, loops, and defaults

November 21, 2022 3 minute read

I’ve been playing around a lot with bicep recently. I like it because it is much more readable than ARM templates and lets me modularize my deployments easily. Recently, I was writing a module for creating named values in Azure API Management. Here is my service.bicep: @description('The name of the API Management instance to deploy this API to.') param serviceName string = 'apim${uniqueString(resourceGroup().id)}' @description('Location for all resources') param location string = resourc...

Top Ten things to consider when taking your GraphQL service into production

November 07, 2022 9 minute read

It’s a somewhat well-known facet of development that we don’t consider production problems until it is too late in the development cycle. When we look at taking a Web API into production, we use API management solutions to provide protection, control, and visibility into our APIs so that we ensure we don’t get woken up by a production outage. The things we need to consider are well understood in APIs in general, but what about GraphQL? GraphQL is a developers dream when it comes to tooling....

Build a GraphQL API on Azure API Management using Bicep

October 10, 2022 5 minute read

When I build a service in the cloud, I describe the infrastructure as a blob of code. There are lots of solutions out there for this. Azure has the Azure Resource Manager (or ARM), which has it’s own JSON or YAML format, for example. Terraform is cross-cloud capable, as is the Serverless Framework. Since I mostly work in Azure, these days, I’be been working more and more with Bicep for my Infrastructure as Code standard. Bicep uses declarative syntax to deploy Azure resources (much like ...

Adrian Hall