In my earlier post, I shared how I clicked a button to migrate Azure CDN to Front Door and then started being charged a lot for hosting a simple blog on Azure. So I decided to end my relationship with Azure and move on to greener pastures with AWS. It was not too much work, so why not. I read about AWS Amplify and saw that it was the perfect solution to my problem. So off I went looking for resources to get onboard. ...
So I recently did something that I didn’t expect to have financial consequences. I switched from Azure CDN to Azure FrontDoor Standard. Sounds like a simple thing to do considering Microsoft was suggesting I do the move - move from one product to another. Unfortunately the implications were that I would now have to pay £34 per month to ensure my blog was running smooth! This is up nearly 33 times what it cost me before! And the warning didn’t actually tell me that there was a base price involved. ...
Featured Image courtesy Miguel Á. Padriñán. I recently ran into a small issue with this blog. The credentials that Github workflows use to deploy the application had expired. As someone who doesn’t login to Azure on a daily basis and whose primary role is not application development on the cloud, I did not see this coming. So my Github action to deploy this blog failed with the following message: AADSTS7000222: The provided client secret keys for app '***' are expired. Visit the Azure portal to create new keys for your app: https://aka.ms/NewClientSecret, or consider using certificate credentials for added security: https://aka.ms/certCreds. Trace ID: bd3c9b5a-5677-4dbf-9136-78883da00700 Correlation ID: cdd461df-0722-4770-9b9a-d97e29181d94 Timestamp: 2022-04-18 18:07:59Z I understood that a credential had expired, which logically meant that I had to reset the credentials for the account/service principal that was being used by the continuous deployment setup for this blog. ...
This is a long read and I spent a pretty long time going through videos and articles compiling this into one post. Not something I would have done usually. But I do think that sometimes having it all in one place is easier to access than splitting into multiple articles. I hope the TOC helps group things. Azure AD is Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service. Lots of words. But do they make sense? ...
Background I have in the past, in my previous job, used ElasticSearch extensively for our internal search. When I joined my current firm, I proposed using Elastic Search for our policy search problem, which apparently was slow and inefficient. This wasn’t surprising at all to me, as they were using simple SQL to search for relevant data. This was bound to be slow. So having proposed Elastic Search, I did a little POC and showed how easy it was for me to set up Elastic search on my machine on one node and showed how searching was a breeze using RESTAPIs and other clients. This POC was sufficient enough for us to consider a wider project and develop a solution which later got ported to Azure Search as we migrated to the cloud. To this day, we haven’t regretted our decision. ...
Background I am proud to say that I work in a team where we follow Test Driven Development and pair programming. This has been a life changing experience for me as for several years, I had been writing code first and only writing tests after I thought it was doing what it meant to be doing which often lead to tests that only tested the bare minimum or lead to poorly thought out code that was badly coupled. However, since the last quarter of 2020, I have been practicing TDD with my pair programming partner on every new project except for when it came to working on legacy code where it would take us, much longer to refactor and make the code testable in the first place. ...
Update - READ THIS FIRST There is now support to connect to any Azure SQL database, Azure SQL Managed Instance and Synapse SQL in Azure Synapse Analytics from your .NET Core app using just the connection string. To learn more about this read the following pages: Use Azure Active Directory Authentication with your Azure DB Using Azure Active Directory auth with SqlClient This will completely eliminate the need to write any code to obtain a service connection in your application. I found this out when I shared this post earlier on Twitter. ...
Background I have been using Logic Apps to transfer data from one database to another. Of course, there is business logic in the queries run on the source database. And in such a case, maybe Azure Data Factory might have been a better choice. It very well could be. But for now I have been using a logic app, that simply runs a pretty big query, fetches the results and inserts into my destination database after some checks on the data present in the destination database. It works. However, using your Logic App to do some data related operations, especially to a SQL database, requires some wisdom. ...
What are Azure Logic Apps? Azure Logic Apps are an Azure service that lets you visually build integrated solutions to connect several different apps and services together, and comes with a click and select interface. It enables you automate business processes without writing any code at all! What is business process? A business process or workflow is a sequence of tasks that produce some sort of outcome, which may be some data, decision, notification. ...
In May 2020, having realised that my role at work had stabilised a bit, I decided to get back to blogging again. I had learned so much over the years and had not really made an effort to share any of it. Not that I have a million followers waiting to read what I share. But for me, it meant, having to think about what I learned again and explain it in a way that another person can understand. An excercise in communication. ...