Sharing Bicep Modules with Azure Container Registry

One of the things I do as a Cloud Native Advocate at Microsoft is build end-to-end lab scenarios in the https://aka.ms/oss-labs repo. Most of the demo scenarios we aim to cover is in and around the container space and a majority of the labs uses Azure Bicep to declaratively provision Azure infrastructure. As more labs get spun up, there is a potential for redundant Bicep code. You might have already guessed, there’s a need for re-usable code to spin up AKS clusters.

Monitoring Azure Container Apps With Azure Managed Grafana

The Azure Monitor team has announced the general availability of the Azure Managed Grafana (AMG) service. As part of the announcement, they also announced the availability of curated Grafana dashboards for various Azure services including Azure Container Apps 🎉

Grafana is very popular within the Cloud Native community and it seems natural to use it for Azure Container Apps (ACA) observability.

In this post, I will walk you through provisioning the ACA and AMG resources using the Terraform AzAPI provider and show you how easy it is to import the ACA dashboards into your AMG instance.

Securely connect to your Azure Linux Virtual Machine with Tailscale SSH

Being on the Cloud Advocate team at Microsoft, we’re always looking to empower every developer to achieve more on Azure. One way of doing this is by bringing you hands-on content to deliver end-to-end scenarios using cloud-native and open source technologies.

My colleague on the Cloud Native team, Aaron Wislang has been cooking up a bunch of labs in our Azure Open Source Labs repo and one area we’ve been collaborating on is within the Azure Linux VM space.

Exploring .NET WebAssembly with WASI

Overview

WebAssembly (Wasm) is something that the Cloud Native Advocacy team has been exploring. It has been around for a few years and has mostly been used within browser-based applications. There are many blog posts on what makes WebAssembly an ideal target for running applications (e.g., smaller footprint with .wasm files compared to containers, code isolation, and sandboxing). My colleague Steven Murawski wrote a blog series on getting started with hosting Wasm apps on an emerging PaaS platform called Hippo which is developed by folks at Fermyon. In Part 1 of the series, he introduces topics and define some of the acronyms like “Wagi” and “WASI”. He also introduced a runtime called Wasmtime which implements the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) standard. This article will walk you through how Steven and I went about getting a .NET console app running as a Wasm app on the Wasmtime runtime in a Dev Container. The .NET console app produced in this article has also been contributed as a csharp template in the yo-wasm repo which is also maintained by Fermyon; so you can quickly test it out for yourself later.

Extending Visual Studio Code Dev Container Features

UPDATE: The dev-container-features-template repo referenced in this post has been archived. Please see my new post here or visit containers.dev for the latest on this topic.

Have you ever wanted to try an Azure CLI extension without having to install the extension yourself on your local machine? VSCode Dev Containers may be a good option.

What is a Dev Container?

Visual Studio Code has an extension called Remote - Containers. This extension lets you use a Docker container as a development environment and is the technology that powers GitHub Codespaces. If you don’t have the option to use Codespaces, the remote container technology also allows you to open build/open the container within your local environment as long as you have Docker Desktop,or Rancher Desktop (with dockerd as the container runtime since containerd will not work with remote containers), or Docker Engine running on your local machine.

Azure AD B2C logouts and redirection URLs

Background

I’ve been helping a client build a customer-facing NodeJS web application which leveraged Azure AD B2C as its identity provider. Things were going well with the development and Azure AD B2C served them really well. It’s cost-effective and gives them all the controls and security features they’ve come to expect with Azure AD (the non-B2C version). As any responsible company, they run penetration tests on the application prior to releasing to production and they identified one item that can pose as a security threat.

Run Terraform With Azure Pipelines

This repo will walk you through an approach to provisioning Azure resources using Terraform code stored in a Git repo and leverage Azure Pipelines (YAML-based) to deploy to dev, test, and prod environments (all in different subscriptions) with approval gates in front of test and prod environments.

Prerequisites

Azure Subscription

If you don’t have Azure, go sign up for a free account and come back.

Azure DevOps

If you do not already have an Azure DevOps organization, follow these instructions to create one.