Deploying your ARM template with linked templates from your local machine

Any now and then you have to make some major changes to the ARM templates of the project you’re working from. While this isn’t hard to do, it can become quite a time-intensive if you have to wait for the build/deployment server to pick up the changes and the actual deployment itself. A faster way to test your changes is by using PowerShell or the Azure CLI to deploy your templates and see what happens. Read more →

Deploying your ARM templates via PowerShell

You might have noticed I’ve been doing quite a bit of stuff with ARM templates as of late. ARM templates are THE way to go if you want to deploy your Azure environment in a professional and repeatable fashion. Most of the time these templates get deployed in your Release pipeline to the Test, Acceptance or Production environment. Of course, I’ve set this up for all of my professional projects along with my side projects. 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 →