Just a quick post about Azure Lean Coffee, hosted by Daniel McLoughlin and Rukaya Ogazi-Khan which is streamed live monthly covering a range of discussion topics on Azure of which I was fortunate enough to get involved in their latest episode. In this weeks episode I was joined along side Michael Durkan and Jeevantika Lingalwar to talk about all things Azure. Some great topics were covered in this episode such as Women In Tech, VMs vs Cloud Native, Chocolate easter eggs & more! Check it out on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VYFcm4GdN8 The post Azure Lean Coffee – Episode 3 appe ..read more

Introduction Deploying to Azure Container Apps with Azure DevOps and want a quick start reference to get going? I’ll detail how you can quick start continuous deployment to your Azure Container App revision in single revision mode with Azure DevOps, featuring a quick start YAML pipeline that will build your container, publish to Azure Container Registry and lastly deploy it to the Container App itself! Multi-revision scope deployments are not in scope for this example. What are Azure Container Apps? Azure Container Apps is a fully managed Kubernetes-based application platform that helps you ..read more

Introduction The GitHub Actions Certification is a newly available cert, as of January 2024 from GitHub. It’s designed to test your proficiency in workflows: from CI/CD, customisations, efficiency, task automation and more. I took and passed the GitHub Actions exam on 26th Jan 2024 and thought I’d detail my experience and learning material that helped me on the study path. You can checkout all the available GitHub certifications here: Highlight your expertise with GitHub Certifications – GitHub Resources. Additionally, you can register for exams by logging into examregistration.github.com with ..read more

Here’s my top 5 Azure Bicep tips & tricks to get you started! Be sure to have the VSCode extension installed. If you’re interested in checking out some real world examples for Bicep please checkout my GitHub project Bicepify where I break down concepts into friendlier learning chunks. I update the repository frequently so be sure to star if you find it useful! Now onto the first Azure Bicep tips & tricks: 1. Auto load required parameters from Bicep modules Did you know you can auto-load module parameters in module blocks by simply using CNTRL+SPACE to auto load the 'params:‘. This sho ..read more

Introduction The Bicep template to deploy this is uploaded to my GitHub here. Deploys in minutes! Azure Front Door Premium allows Private Link connections to Azure PaaS services such as Azure Storage, App services and even AKS/Azure Container Apps. Private Endpoints allow us to securely send traffic via the Azure backbone network with Microsoft directly to your virtual network without leaving and going via the internet. In this post I’ll detail the benefits of Azure Front Door Premium integration to your Azure App service, what the deployment looks like and an Azure Bicep template to quick sta ..read more

Introduction Shared variable file patterns with Azure Bicep, what is it and what does it mean? How can you benefit from this? What problems can it solve? Without regurgitating too much from the Microsoft Docs on this at a high-level it’s a great way to utilise a JSON file to put common variables you want to reuse in your Bicep files. In this post, we’ll cover some basics of how this can be useful and expand on the Microsoft examples to inspire more adoption of this where you see necessary for your own Bicep configurations. All code examples in this post are in my GitHub project Bicepify, where ..read more

Introduction A few months ago Microsoft released the Azure OpenAI Chat Solution Accelerator. The accelerator is to help organisations fast track and simplify their adoption of the Azure OpenAI service by giving an out the box private chat solution that gives you a familiar user experience. This is enabling your organisation to have your own ‘https://chat.yourorg.co.uk’ style application that your employees can harness the epic capabilities Azure OpenAI has to offer. Deploying Azure OpenAI Chat Deploying can be done quite simply by following the docs on the GitHub page here: azurechat/docs/4-de ..read more

Introduction Bicep test framework is still in early developmental phase being an experimental feature. It was first presented by Bicep team on the August community call and peaked the interest from the community, myself included. The goal of the test framework is a focus on client-side tests without the need to send off to ARM, this will help validate earlier in the CI/CD lifecycle and bring more confidence come the time of actual deployment. Sounds great and I’m a huge fan of this direction. How to enable the Bicep test framework? Test framework is still in experimental stages! Proceed with ..read more

Introduction There’s a few different options when it comes to consuming Bicep modules, do you need to write your own modules? Use the public Bicep registry? or are there other options to consider? I’ll detail my experiences & thoughts on this with pros & cons that each of the routes have. To check these different approaches out you can head over to the Bicepify GitHub project to see more: https://github.com/riosengineer/Bicepify/tree/main/bicep-examples/consuming-modules Public Bicep Registry Azure/bicep-registry-modules: Bicep registry modules (github.com) Microsoft have recently star ..read more

Testing your Bicep modules with PSRule is a great way to identify that your code is meeting Azure best practice. But how do you actually test your Bicep modules with PSRule properly? How can you structure your Git repository? How can I configure PSRule to test the modules? Can I document what the modules do, and their params? I’ll go into depth on this below All of the content shared here is uploaded to my GitHub repository which can be found here: bicep-module-tests/ at main · riosengineer/bicep-module-tests (github.com). The problem PSRule cannot run reliably against your actual Bicep templ ..read more