Friday, December 31, 2021

Plan for Chaos with Azure Chaos Studio

Two things rule the reliability of a system. Application and infrastructure. Developing applications is not easy but complicated and can be controlled to a certain extent. Things we know works are called features and things we cannot or forgot to fixed will be called known issues. There are many tests you can run to ensure the code works and code + UI = application works. Unit tests, UI tests, automated scripts, you name it. 


It is one thing to have a working application. But how about infrastructure? Many thought cloud could make life easier for infrastructure people. It just made life even harder. If things go wrong (chaos happens), there can be very minimal we can do to control. One thing we can do is try to plan for chaos.

Azure Chaos Studio just allows you to plan and test your infrastructure and prepare to be ready for any unexpected situations. It is not just a signal based simulation. It makes infrastructure fail for real. This makes the worst possible scenarios testable. 

Monday, December 27, 2021

Azure Blueprints to replace ARM Templates?

 It is a controversial topic to be discussed. Will Azure Blueprints replace ARM Templates or Bicep? Well, we have been asking too much from ARM Templates. It can be very complexed, not just from the language perspective, but from the organisation perspective. Bicep solves the language complexity, but building a large infrastructure with many policies is always a mess. We can combine ARM templates but chances are multiple teams work in different ones if it is a large organisation. 


Let me be clear for a second. Blueprints does not replaces ARM templates. If you look at the image above, you may figure out why. 

Wednesday, December 22, 2021

How to use Azure Spot VMs?

 There are instances where you need high availability for regular workloads. But there are also instances where you do not need availability all the time. Imagine having a test environment,  things can wait. Late night batch processes might not need very high availability. On the other hand,  these batch processes can be compute expensive. If you are to have a separate instance allocated, that might cost considerably higher.  


Saturday, December 18, 2021

Bicep Templates for APIM Configuration - Part 2

 In previous article I have explained how to create an API with Bicep. But APIs in APIM goes towards versioning and then endpoints. 

If you do not intend to use versioning, you can create API in the last step of the previous article. Otherwise you need to define a version set first. 

resource adminApi_VersionSet_V1 'Microsoft.ApiManagement/service/apiVersionSets@2021-04-01-preview' = {
  name: 'adminApi_VersionSet_V1'
  parent: apim
  properties: {
    description: 'Admin API'
    displayName: 'Admin API'
    versioningScheme:'Segment'
  }
}

Here I am using the Segment as the versioning scheme. You can opt to use the Query String or a header as well instead.  

Sunday, November 28, 2021

Bicep Templates for APIM Configuration - Part 1

Here are some of the Bicep templates I came across when working through. 

Create an APIM Instance


resource apim 'Microsoft.ApiManagement/service@2021-04-01-preview' = {
  name: apimName
  location: region
  sku: {
    name: sku
    capacity: 1
  }
  properties: {
    publisherEmail: publisherEmail
    publisherName: publisherName
    virtualNetworkConfiguration: {
      subnetResourceId: '/subscriptions/${subscription().subscriptionId}/resourceGroups/${resourceGroup().name}/providers/Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworks/${virtualNetworkName}/subnets/${subnetName_ApimAccess}'
    }
    virtualNetworkType:'External'
  }
}

This example allows the APIM to be connected to a subnet on a virtual network.

Sunday, November 14, 2021

Azure Cloud Adoption Framework: Where to start?

 With my brief time of over 6 years on Azure, I have involved with many migrations, new developments as well as lift and shifts. One question that every instance had in our minds was where to start? This is a very business critical question. Developers often like to see good processes and practices while managers do like to see results soon. End of the day one of the key unclear reason to go to cloud is believing cloud can do super stuffs at a lower price. Is it so?


Saturday, October 23, 2021

Bicep Templates for Cosmos DB Setup

 Recently I came up with a few templates for setting up Cosmos DB Infrastructure for a demonstration. Following steps will show how to setup the Cosmos DB, Create Collections,  Create Private DNS Zones and Setup a Custom SQL role. 

The complete example is available publicly on GitHub. 

https://github.com/Malind19/springdata-infrastructure/blob/main/modules/cosmos.bicep

Sunday, September 5, 2021

Advantage of using B2C in your next application

Gone are the days you spend days building the security functionalities like Login,  Registration and Password Reset.  There are plenty of modern authentication mechanisms that can be plugged and played such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Live and so on. What is there is a way you can use all of them in matter of clicks?