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This blog post is a contribution to Azure Back to School - an annual community event taking place in September. For the Community by the Community, during the whole month of September, contributors share their knowledge and experience about Azure. You’re welcome to check out all the contributions here: 2023 Azure Back to School Session Schedule Introduction Chaos engineering has been known to the tech industry for quite many years now, but it has gained significant popularity and wider adoption during the last few years. There are good reasons for why this acceleration has happened. If we take a look at a modern software development landscape we will see that we’re steadily building more complex, distributed systems and applications, with hundreds or even thousands of dependencies and interconnections. Ensuring that all of these bits and pieces play nicely together to provide availability, stability and security of our systems at all times is a challenge that’s not for the faint-hearted. ...

Introduction When working with Kubernetes there may be cases where you may need to use port forwarding to get access to an application running inside the cluster. Some of the use cases may be: accessing information in internal applications that are not meant to be exposed for public access verifying that the application works as expected prior to exposing it for public access troubleshooting purposes Port forwarding is a functionality that is available in Kubernetes via kubectl port-forward command. This command creates a direct connection between the caller (typically a client machine) and the Pod where the application is running inside the cluster. You can either target a specific Pod or any Pod fronted by Kubernetes resources like Service or Deployment. You can read more about the command in official documentation: port-forward. ...

I’ve been in quite a pickle recently: I needed to find out how many and what Azure Policy definitions from Guest Configuration category are currently assigned to my subscription, so that I could understand if any of those policies are applicable to Azure Arc-enabled servers that are residing in the same subscription. Why? Well, because Guest Configuration is a billed functionality, when it comes to Azure Arc. In this case it’s good to get an overview if any policies related to the billed functionality are enabled in order to further evaluate if you want to use this functionality or not (and therefore disable it to avoid undesired billing). You may also have different use cases for why you would want to retrieve the same information from Azure Policy🧐 ...

If you’re using Application Insights SDK in your .NET applications and you want to gather performance counters like disk, memory or CPU usage, you have two main approaches that you can follow: EventCounters: this is a future-proof, cross-platform alternative to classic performance counters that natively supports collection of system and custom counters both from .NET Framework and .NET (Core) applications. I will share more about EventCounters and how you can use these in a subsequent blog post, therefore EventCounters are out of scope for this blog post. ...

⚠️ Please note that Azure vulnerability scanning with the integrated Qualys scanner has now been deprecated (as of 1st of May 2024). In the modern reality with tens of security vulnerabilities that are being disclosed daily you need to continuously implement a variety of security controls in order to ensure that your systems are strongly protected. Even if you’re running on the cloud⛅ One of the security controls that I would like to talk about in this blog post is vulnerability scanning. Vulnerability scanning is an essential practice for maintaining a secure infrastructure, mitigating risks, and protecting sensitive data from potential threats. It allows organizations to stay proactive, comply with regulations, and safeguard their systems against known vulnerabilities and emerging security risks. ...