Azure Notification Hub race condition

Both development and production environments are deployed in a fully automated fashion using ARM templates. As part of these deployments we also create Notification Hubs and related authorization rules. I noticed today that some of our deployments were failing due to the fact that the Notification Hub resource provider was…

Setting App Service connection strings in ARM

For automatic deployment of test environments we are spinning up App Service instances and want to automatically set connection strings for the database and other services in the same template. According to the Azure Resource Manager documentation [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/templates/microsoft.web/2018-11-01/sites/config#connstringinfo-object]…

Automation in Azure

Deploying resources and workloads at scale requires a healthy amount of automation. Automation helps to deliver consistent and repeatable results. I've tried to categorize some of the technology and provide some pointers to areas of application and pros and cons. Note: this is not an exhaustive list but tries to…

Tracking changes to Azure Resource Manager providers

A colleague of mine, Tyler Ayers [https://github.com/tyayers], has written a pretty neat Azure Function that tracks changes made to Azure Resource Manager Providers (ARM) and show these changes in a timeline [https://azure-changes.azurewebsites.net/]. The details will give you a clear overview what has been changed…

Hunting Threats with Azure Security Center

In February I had the chance to attend a session by Yuri Diogenes [https://twitter.com/yuridiogenes], Program Manager at Microsoft, on how Azure Security Center works and how to demo it in a real life scenario. The session he gave ended up as one of the excellent Azure Security…