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Context While most of the application integration patterns are moving towards real-time, near-real-time and stream based solutions, there are still requirement to have batch file based data movement. These requirements are often for reporting or data warehousing scenario or while integrating with a legacy system. While there are many products that help setup SFTP server, Azure was missing a SaaS offering for hosted SFTP server, like Amazon’s AWS Transfer on top of S3. To host SFTP in Azure the customer has to setup their own SFTP workload either using a VM hosting an SFTP server and mounting the blob storage as a VM disk or hosting the SFTP server as a container on services like ACI and mounting the storage account. While hosting an SFTP VM is not a complex task, but it adds to the organization’s maintenance list, to keep it up and running, securing it and patching updates while maintaining uptime. ...

Introduction APIs have become so popular that almost all websites and applications rely on APIs to get data from server. Often user impersonation is used to authenticate as well as authorize access to the resource exposed by an API, but there are also use cases where application itself needs data from an API for functioning. Currently the most used authentication mechanism is OAuth, where identity management is performed by a third provider and both the client and resource server trusts this identity provider. While this works well, there is also another way to authenticate when the interaction is purely machine to machine, and works based on SSL certificates and is called Client Certificate Authentication. ...

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. So we had to setup a pipeline, give the pipeline service account access to the POC resource group, then actually triggering the deployment. ...

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. ...

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. The process also validates if the resource can be moved or not, for example an Azure SQL Database cannot be moved without moving the SQL Server instance, and when a SQL Server instance is moved across, all the databases gets moved automatically. ...

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. Currently there is no out-of-the-box tasks that support this behavior (or I could not find any). Deployment Mode Reference ...

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. ...