Azure

A thought struck me one day when I was working with onboarding machines to Azure Arc. If you want to onboard multiple servers at scale to Azure Arc, you would need a Service Principal with Azure Connected Machine Onboarding role in the respective subscription or resource group where you want to create Azure Arc-enabled servers. An interesting thing here is: what if you would like to re-use the same service principal in order to onboard more Azure Arc resources but to another subscription and/or another resource group? ...

🎄This blog post is also a contribution to Azure Advent Calendar where during December, experts from the tech community share their knowledge through contributions of a specific technology in the Azure domain. You’re welcome to check out all the contributions here: Azure Advent Calendar Have you already seen “Automatic upgrade” property when creating a new AKS cluster in Azure Portal?😺 ...

In this blog post I would like to take a look at how we can ensure that Dockerfiles we create are of high quality and are following best practices in the industry. Tools like Hadolint make it very easy for us to do that and can automate the verification process. If you’re working with containerized applications or are planning on containerizing an application you will most likely be working with a Dockerfile. Dockerfile is a variation of a text file (without a file extension though) where you define a set of instructions for assembling, configuring and starting up your application container image. Those instructions are then compiled during the build process (for example, with docker build command) and are packaged into an artifact, known as a container image, which may then be pushed to a container registry like Docker Hub or Azure Container Registry. ...

In July 2019, as part of Sprint 154, Microsoft introduced support for auditing in Azure DevOps and this is a feature that you really should look into if you haven’t set it up or maybe haven’t heard about it yet. Auditing in Azure DevOps allows you to get an aggregated log of important events related to access control, permission and resource management++ across projects in your Azure DevOps organization. Functionality evolved quite a bit since it’s initial release and it currently also supports streaming logs to an external service like Azure Monitor logs, which we will take a look at in a bit. At the moment of writing this blog post the feature is still in public preview according to official Microsoft documentation. Hopefully it will soon be released in GA - according to the blog post from November 2021 the plan was to release it in GA early 2022 so let’s hope that it will happen by the end of 2022 at least!😁 You can check out the blog post link in Additional resources section below. ...

⚠️ Please note that the HTTP Application routing add-on for AKS is now deprecated and will be retired on 3rd of March, 2025. Normally if you were to expose an application running in AKS for external access, you would need multiple bits and pieces to be deployed and configured: Ingress Controller to ensure proper traffic routing and load balancing in an AKS cluster; Certificate management solution for automatic obtaining, provisioning, renewing and using of TLS certificates for applications running in AKS clusters; DNS zone and respective DNS records to expose applications on a specific URL for external access; This can be quite a lot to set up and will in some cases be an overhead for dev/test or playground AKS clusters. That’s when HTTP Application Routing add-on can help you out and do all this work for you! 🚀 ...