Adding authentication to your HTTP triggered Azure Functions

Azure Functions are great! HTTP triggered Azure Functions are also great, but there’s one downside. All HTTP triggered Azure Functions are publicly available. While this might be useful in a lot of scenario’s, it’s also quite possible you don’t want ‘strangers’ hitting your public endpoints all the time. One way you can solve this is by adding a small bit of authentication on your Azure Functions. For HTTP Triggered functions you can specify the level of authority one needs to have in order to execute it. Read more →

Creating a new Storage account with containers using ARM

As it happens, I started implementing some new functionality on a project. For this functionality, I needed an Azure Storage Account with a folder (containers) inside. Because it’s a project not maintained by me, I had to do some searching on how to create such a container in the most automated way, because creating containers in storage account isn’t supported. That is, until recently! In order to create a container inside a storage account, you only have to add a new resource to it. Read more →

Using MSI with Azure Functions and Key Vault

There’s a relative new feature available in Azure called Managed Service Identity. What it does is create an identity for a service instance in the Azure AD tenant, which in its turn can be used to access other resources within Azure. This is a great feature, because now you don’t have to maintain and create identities for your applications by yourself anymore. All of this management is handled for you when using a System Assigned Identity. Read more →

Using dynamically linked Azure Key Vault secrets in your ARM template

I’m in the process of adding an ARM template to an open source project I’m contributing to. All of this was pretty straightforward, until I needed to add some secrets and connection strings to the project. While it’s totally possible to integrate these secrets in your ARM parameter file or in your continuous deployment pipeline, I wanted to do something a bit more advanced and secure. Of course, Azure Key Vault comes to mind! Read more →

Sharing an Outlook ICS file with your friends

Normally when you are creating new appointments via Outlook in your organization you are inviting everyone who should join the meeting. This works quite alright, but not something I wanted to do for a couple of meetings I am planning. The meetings I’m organizing are optional to everyone inside the company, therefore I don’t want to spam the inbox of everyone with a meeting most of them (probably around 95%) aren’t interested in. Read more →