Beneath Abstraction

Running Sidecar Containers in Azure App Service: An experiment with Dapr Today I decided to try Azure App Service’s new ability to run sidecar containers. My goal, To create a simple .NET API, run it in Azure App Service, and pair it with Dapr as a sidecar container and use it for state management. Locally, Dapr would connect to a local Redis docker container, and once deployed to Azure, it would seamlessly switch to Azure Cache for Redis. ...

Introduction In this blog post we look into a scalable and flexible platform to run microservices on Azure without the complexity of managing infrastructure. Azure Container Apps allows you to run containerized microservices and integrating Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime) can simplify the communication between services, manage state, and handle pub/sub messaging. This blog also shows how to set up Azure Container Apps, and how to deploy Dapr-enabled microservices that communicate with each other. ...

Understanding and Mitigating Prompt Injection Attacks with Prompt Shield in Azure AI Studio Introduction In the fast-changing landscape of Generative AI and its applications, keeping AI models secure and reliable is very important. Prompt injection is one of the prominent attack identified against AI Implementations. Azure AI Studio offers a solutions to tackle these threats and is called Prompt Shield. This blog will explain what prompt injection attacks are, their possible effects, and how Azure AI Studio’s Prompt Shield can protect against them. ...

This guide will walk you through the process of enhancing language models using RAG architecture in Azure AI Studio. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities, like those of GPTs, by integrating an information retrieval system. This addition grounds data and controls the context for the LLM’s response generation.

Introduction Azure Application Gateway provides a powerful solution for load balancing, SSL termination, and URL-based routing. In this blog post, we will discuss a common scenario where we need to forward traffic to two different Azure API Management instances based on the incoming URL, distinguishing between non-production and production environments. Problem Statement Consider a scenario where you have two separate instances of Azure API Management (Sku: any non consumption tier): one for non-production/testing (nonprod) and the other for production (prod). The requirement is to route incoming traffic through an Azure Application Gateway, forwarding requests to the appropriate API Management instance based on the path specified in the URL. Specifically, requests with the path /nonprod/* should be directed to the non-production API Management instance, while requests without this path should be forwarded to the production instance. ...

Context The requirement here is to be able to add dynamic menu items to a MAUI app. The use case chosen here is of selection of a font from a list of fonts installed on the machine. The list of fonts is shows under a menu item in the menu bar. More on menu bar from the Microsoft documentation Approach Step 1: Mark up The component to be used here is the MenuBarItem. This component support binding context of the content page. As part of the page markup, a menu item is added to the page and the “Choose Language” menu item is left blank, so that the menu items can be added after fetching it. ...

Context Powerapps Portal gives a quick and easy way to build public facing websites. Data in the portal is mostly fetched from Microsoft Dataverse using Powerplatform FetchXML or the portal’s Web API. These operations are secured using portal’s application session, as explained here. Often there are requirements to consume an externally hosted API, in this particular example an API hosted in Azure behind an API Management. With Javascript the only option to trigger an API, implementing a secret based authentication is out of scope. But there is an alternate approach. ...