azure

Nowadays it’s clear that IT trends such as serverless computing, containerization, cloud native apps, DevOps artificial intelligence, machine learning and both hybrid and multi-cloud solutions are becoming main stream or the “new normal”. All businesses, big or small, are looking for cloud experts with key skills in many of these hot trends. With serverless architectures, applications are separated into various individual functions which are triggered by different types of events. This changes the way we normally think about applications and also the way we must approach operations in terms of monitoring performance, tracing, scaling and high availability. Good knowledge of AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, and event-driven architectures are skills employers will be looking for.

You start developing an ASP.NET Core application to run it in Kubernetes and suddenly you find yourself creating a docker file, building an image, pushing the image to a registry, creating both a deployment and a service definition for Kubernetes and you wonder if there is a tool out there to help you streamline the whole process.

For my recent talk at .NET Conf Madrid I managed to install Elastic Search, Fluentd and Kibana (EFK) as a logging solution for the AKS cluster I used in my demos. The fact is that such deployment was possible thanks to Tim Park and his post Logging with Fluentd, ElasticSearch, and Kibana (EFK) on Kubernetes on Azure where I learned that to effectively deploy EFK on AKS I would have to tweak the resource definitions found in the Kubernetes project.

Last May I wrote: Accepting Azure Marketplace Terms with Azure CLI and this time we’ll accomplish the same task with Ansible. Turns out that Ansible 2.6 comes with a handy new module: azure_rm_resource which lets you create, update or delete any Azure resource using Azure REST API. So I decided to take it for a test drive with the “Accepting Terms” sample.

I’ve been using Ansible and the Azure CLI every single day for the last 3 months. Non stop work editing playbooks and scripts with Visual Studio Code and running them on Ubuntu (WSL) on my Windows 10 machine. Turns out that because Ansible uses python version 2.7.12 and the Azure CLI uses python 3.6.5 you can make a mess if you get “creative” trying to install the tools instead of using the recommended commands:

For ages I’ve been waiting for a way to enforce netwok policies on AKS, so last weekend while I was googling around, I found this hidden gem posted by Marcus Robinson: Enforcing Network Policies using kube-router on AKS and had to test the proposed solution. Prerequisites: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) deployed with HTTP application routing enabled. kubectl installed Create a service exposed throuh your AKS DNS Zone # Let’s start by deploying the following service to your Kubernetes cluster, by saving the following content to a file named dni-function.yaml and replacing [YOUR_DNS__ZONE_NAME] with the corresponding value of your service:

When you try to deploy a VM from the Marketplace using an ARM (json) template you’ll get an error like the one below in the case when you’ve not previously accepted the Legal terms for the image: [{"Legal terms have not been accepted for this item on this subscription. To accept terms using Powershell..."}] Accepting the Legal terms is something you have to do once per subscription for each provider offer you want to use. So how can you accept the terms using the Azure CLI (version 2.0.26 or higher)?

NOTE: The issue described in this post was fixed!!! (ansible 2.5.2 and Azure CLI 2.0.34) # Last week I tried to run this simple Ansible playbook in Azure Cloud Shell: # resource_group.yml # Create test resource group in west europe - name: Create a Resource Group hosts: localhost connection: local gather_facts: no tasks: - name: Create Resource Group azure_rm_resourcegroup: location: westeurope name: test state: present The first attempt to run the playbook with:

Disclaimer: samples provided in this post were tested both in Azure Container Services (AKS) and Kubernetes provided by Docker for Windows. In previous posts I showed you how to Run a Precompiled .NET Core Azure Function in a Container and how to Deploy your first Service to Azure Container Services (AKS). By now you should be able to run your own services in Kubernetes and starting to wonder about how can you give answers to questions such as:

Disclaimer: For those of you who are expecting to learn or read about new technical information and cool new product features or roadmaps I have bad news: almost everything that Microsoft shares with MVPs during the Summit is under an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) which means that what I’ve learned in Redmond stays with me, inside my head.

So last week I was in a rush to find a fast and easy way to consume events from Azure Event Hubs and send them to a Kafka topic. After googling a bit I found this project: Kafka Connect Azure IoT Hub. Yes the name of the project can be misleading, but since IoT Hub is a service which relies on Event Hubs and also taking a close look to the code showed that it uses the Event Hubs client for java, I decided to give it a try.

Greetings readers! Hope you all a Happy New Year! Last post I was about running a Precompiled .NET Core Azure Function in a Container. This time let’s go one step further and Run a Durable Azure Function in a Container Prerequisites: Docker installed and basic knowledge. .NET Core Azure Storage Account Azure Durable Functions Knowledge Create a .NET Core lib project # Create a .NET Core lib project.

So this morning I found my self browsing through the images Microsoft has published in the Docker Hub and then I saw this one: microsoft/azure-functions-runtime and decided to Run a Precompiled .NET Core Azure Function in a Container. Prerequisites: Docker installed and basic knowledge. .NET Core Create a .NET Core lib project # Create a .NET Core lib project.

In this post I’ll show you how to Deploy your first Service to Azure Container Services (AKS). Prerequisites: Azure CLI installed and basic knowledge experience. Docker installed and basic knowledge. Azure Subscription Kubernetes experience. Create a resource group: # Firt create a Resource Group. Be aware that at the time of writing AKS is not available in all Azure regions.

In this post I’ll show you how to Use PowerShell to enable Azure Storage Account Firewall Rules. Be sure to be have AzureRM PowerShell 4.4.1 module installed. Login to your Azure Account # Launch Powershell and start by Login to your Azure Account.

In this post I’ll show you how to Use PowerShell to Enable and Automate Azure Analysis Backup. Enable Azure Analysis Service Backup # Enable-AzureRmAnalysisServicesBackup is a small powershell script that uses the the Set-AzureRmResource cmdlet to enable backup location to an Azure Analysis Service instance.

Last week, firewall support was added to Azure Analysis Service (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-analysis-services-adds-firewall-support/). The thing is that, at the time of writing, there is no AzureRM cmdlet available to Use PowerShell to Enable Azure Analysis Services Firewall So, with the help of Resource Explorer I found which properties must be added to the service (resource) in order to enable the firewall:

Step by step: .Net Core and Azure Search is small introduction on how to connect to Azure Search, create and delete indexes, models, add documents and perform basic queries. Let’s go for it: Create an Azure Search service # Create an Azure Search service in your Azure subscription, and get the Azure Search name and primary Read-Write key.

This week there was a small outage within the Azure Data Lake Store service and as consequence I wondered how could I Read Azure Service Health Activity Logs with .NET Core. Let’s go for it: Create a folder for your new project # Open a command promt an run:

This week I had to repeat the process of creating a Service Principal in order to use the Microsoft.Azure.Management.Fluent lib with .NET Core so I decided it was time to script the process. With the following script you can Create a Service Principal and write required parameters to a .azureauth file.