Cloning a Azure Function App

Recently I had a requirement to make a copy of a Function App from the production version to support a POC implementation of an solution upgrade. One option was to deploy the Release branch which had the version same as in PROD (we already made updates to that function app post release, so DEV was already a lot of commits ahead). The challenge with this approach was, since we did not had a hotfix release, there were no Pipelines setup for Release branch....

February 10, 2022 · 2 min · 226 words · Me

Policy Execution in Azure APIM.

What are APIM Policies? APIM policies are statements executed by Azure APIM to modify the behavior of API request, response and exception flows. The logic/conditions written as part of the policies are executed at various stages of API execution like, request received (inbound), before request sent to backend service/API (backend), before sending response to requester (outbound) and in case of any exceptions during the request processing (on-error). Policies are defined as an XML format with different tag to define the execution stage and the actual policy....

October 27, 2021 · 3 min · 626 words · Me

Move azure resources between resource groups

Problem While working with Azure cloud platform, often there will be instances where resources needs moving across resource groups for maintenance reasons or because of re-organising of products. There might even cases where the resource may need to be moved across subscriptions. Solution In Azure resources can be moved across resource groups from the portal UI or Azure CLI or powershell or from the rest APIs. Moving the resource using the portal UI is as easy as going through a wizard like steps and clicking finish at the end of it....

October 12, 2021 · 2 min · 394 words · Me

Deploying 'JUST' the modified ARM templates

Problem The project has a bunch of ARM templates as part of IAC scripts and more often only couple, if not few templates get modified. But when deploying using Azure pipeline all the templates gets deployed. Even though ARM template deployment support incremental mode, if a templates is deployed with exact same properties, the resource gets recreated. The project does not want to recreate all the templates when only a few are changed....

September 5, 2021 · 2 min · 400 words · Me

utterances: Comments section for your static web site

Problem When your website is a bunch of html, css, image and js files with no backend and is a blog (like mine) and you are expecting your readers to give feedback on your content and be interactive, you definitely need a comments section for your posts. Without an actual server for storage, it is impossible to implement user comments. With non revenue generating sites like mine it would not be an option to spend money every month to maintain few user comments if any....

August 13, 2021 · 2 min · 325 words · Me

Identity in Microsoft Azure - Modern Authentication

Introduction Continuing from the previous post, the new generation of authentication mechanism was created to satisfy the new generation of application, starting from apps that run just in the browser to apps that run on micro-controllers. This new generation of authentication mechanism called as the modern authentication protocols are built on top of the OAuth protocol and taking inspiration from SAML. In the below article the term IDP refers to the Identity provider, the external service that is responsible for authenticating a user and issuing authorization tokens....

August 1, 2021 · 6 min · 1238 words · Me

Identity in Microsoft Azure - A bit of history

Introduction Authentication has been an important component in the world of IT from the time companies required their employees to prove their identity to use the company’s computing resources whether it was to execute its business processes or accessing email or file. During the earlier days employees used to login to their computers using a username and password, which was stored in a central server like an active directory (in case of Microsoft tech stack)....

July 24, 2021 · 4 min · 740 words · Me