Developer onboarding experience with CodeSpaces

Introduction

The project needs to increase velocity and a new developer arrives in the team. Now is typically the time where all chaos begins, as this person needs to be onboarded with the full toolchain linked to the project. Sound familiar? It does to me at least. Which is one of the reasons why I love CodeSpaces! Here you can have a development environment for VS Code full configured, which can then be leveraged in a cloud hosted manner. Even with having a secure connection to your locally installed VS Code. Sounds too good to be true? Let us take a look at the step-by-step experience of onboarding a new developer!

 

Resources

In today’s post, we’ll be using some resources to get us started…

• Template repository with a starter .NET Core development environment for Codespaces, including basic system tools / extensions (like Functions, Copilot, etc)
• GitHub CodeSpaces
• GitHub Co-Pilot

 

Step-by-Step Experience

Azure Serverless Compute Options

Introduction
A bit less than a year ago I blogged my opinion on “Cloud Native”, where the objective of today is to provide a bit more nuance to this previous post. Let us categorize it as “progressive insights”, due to having these type of discussions on a virtually daily basis. Therefore I wanted to share this with a broader audience, as I expect this is valuable to all. Where I will also try to make it a bit more tangible to link it to “Serverless” options in Azure.

Opinion – Cloud Native, Cloud Native and Cloud Native? What I like about, and my two cents on, running Containers, Kubernetes and/or Serverless

Introduction

In the beginning of the month I posted about my experience of moving VMchooser from “Serverless” to “Containers”. As in, moving from one way of implementing a CloudNative architecture to another… Since then, I have actually moved back to “Serverless”.  Though the cogwheels in my head have been turning 24/7 on how to put everything around this into perspective. Yesterday Yves made a tweet (reply) that really made something click inside of my head…

@LaurentGoderre @DanRosanova @sfeldman @Microsoft @MicrosoftAzure Azure is itself an orchestrator, it provisions st… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

—
Yves Goeleven (@YvesGoeleven) February 22, 2020

In today’s post I’m going to try to do a “brain dump” of several thoughts that have been floating around in my mind. Where I hope this will help you in your journey of “finding your perfect rock”. Here I will indicate what I like about the various options and what my typical advice would be to organizations looking to do a given option.

Improving your code quality by linking Azure DevOps with SonarCloud

Introduction

In a customer workshop earlier this week, Hans mentioned a very nice tool (SonarCloud). He used it “in his previous life and was very enthusiastic about it. So this immediately triggered my curiosity… 😉 As it is free for public projects, I investigated how easy it was to integrate into my existing pipelines. Which turned out to be quite easy! After browsing around a bit on how to integrate it into a YAML pipeline, I can proudly say that VMchooser is now fully hooked up with SonarCloud.

However, it did confirm my suspicion, that I am a lousy developer! 😉 Though better lousy code fulfilling a purpose than having no alternative at all?!?

Anyhow, today’s post is about the experience of moving existing pipelines to SonarCloud and investigate the results you get out of it.

Leveraging Azure Tags and Azure Graph for deploying to your Blue/Green environments

Introduction

For this post I am assuming you are pretty familiar with the concept of deployment strategies (if not check out this post by Etienne). Now these are typically seen from an application deployment level, where platforms (like for instance Kubernetes) typically have out-of-the box mechanisms in place to do this. Now what if you would want to do this on an “infrastructure level”, like for instance the Kubernetes version of Azure Kubernetes Service. We could do an in-place upgrade, which will carefully cordon and drain the nodes. Though what if things go bad? We could do a Canary, Blue/Green, A/B, Shadow, … on cluster level too? Though how would we tackle the infrastructure point of view of this? That is the base for today’s post!

 

Architecture at hand

For today’s post we’ll leverage the following high level architecture ;

This project leverages Terraform under the hood. Things like DNS, Traffic Manager, Key Vault, CosmosDB, etc are “statefull’ where its lifecycle is fully managed by Terraform. On the other hand, our kubernetes clusters are “stateless” from an Infrastructure-as-Code point-of-view. We deploy them via Terraform, though do not keep track of them… All the lifecycle management is done on operating on the associated tags afterwards.

 

Community-Tool-of-the-day

The drawing above was not created in Visio for once. The above was made leveraging CloudSkew, which was created by Mithun Shanbhag. Always awesome to see community contributions, which we can only applaud!

Using B-series for your Dev VM in Azure

Introduction

Earlier this week I tweeted my excitement of using an Azure B-series machine for my Dev VM in Azure. And Jan was curious to know what type I used…

@kvaes @woutervanranst Which size do you use?

—
Jan Tielens (@jantielens) April 16, 2018

Which got a response from Sven that I would probably blog on it…

@jantielens @kvaes @woutervanranst Wait a couple hours, days... He will create a blogpost with his full setup. 🙂 W… twitter.com/i/web/status/9…

—
Sven Van den brande (@SVandenbrande) April 16, 2018

So…

PowerApps & Functions – Where low/no-code meets serverless… organizations can create apps faster!

Introduction

Like many organization, you’re probably also looking for a more “rapid development” track for a subset of your applications. I’ve heard a lot of reasons for this… Going from rapid prototyping to having small apps that make life a lot easier within the organization (like typical approval flows). For this we’re going to see how we can combine PowerApps & Azure Functions! By using PowerApps we want to take a low/no-code approach to creating the front-end, where Functions (or even Logic Apps as an alternative) will allow us to provide specific back-end data.

Recipe for today

Today we’ll be using the following ingredients as a base for the recipe of the day ;

• Function Backend :  https://github.com/kvaes/azure-functions-turbinerepair (created after following this tutorial)
• PowerApps Tutorial : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-powerapps-scenario

Here we’ll be building a small powerapp that’ll call an API (OpenAPI Spec) that is hosted as an Azure function. So basically connecting a low/no-code app to a serverless API.

What does it look like to deploy a DevOps project into Azure for a Java Application?

Introduction

A few months ago “Azure Devops Projects” was released. As I haven’t had the time yet to test-drive it, I was still sceptic towards the service from a naming perspective. In full disclosure, for me DevOps is about three aspects ; People, Processes & Products (“Tools”). The last part is typically, and maybe surprisingly, the most easy part to do. That being said, as I tried this service, I must admit that this service reduces the friction to set up an end-to-end project. This is where the Azure Devops Project shines! It guides you in a step-by-step manner to set up the end-to-end project for a variety of languages and deployment methods.

 

A brief walk-through

As we all know, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. So let’s see what the flow looks like in reality?

Azure Active Directory : Group integration for daemon / server applications (aka Service Principals)

Introduction

Today’s blog post will be how you can leverage the authentication scenario of a Daemon, Service User or Server Application when our application/API is using Azure Active Directory for its authentication flows.

“An example of a daemon application is a batch job, or an operating system service running in the background. This type of application requests an access token by using its application identity and presenting its Application ID, credential (password or certificate), and application ID URI to Azure AD. After successful authentication, the daemon receives an access token from Azure AD, which is then used to call the web API.”

In essence, a “daemon application” will do a “clients credentials grant” whilst using an Azure Active Directory Service Principal. The “application id” of the service principal will serve as the “client_id” and a generated “secret” will service as the “client_secret”.

In addition to this, we want our application to grant permissions (authorization & identification) based on the group memberships of Azure Active Directory. Where this is pretty straightforward for our basic user objects. This requires a bit of attention when wanting to achieve the same for our service principal.

Azure : Using PHP to go all oauth2 on the management API!

Introduction

As a hobby effort, I wanted to create a small poc where any user would be able to login with their AAD user, grant access to an application, after which that application could query their subscriptions.

In all honesty, I’ve been struggling more than I like to admit with getting this working… So this post will cover all the steps that you need to do to get this working!

 

Oauth & Azure AD

Before getting our hands dirty, read up on the following post ; Authorize access to web applications using OAuth 2.0 and Azure Active Directory

Ready it thoroughly! To be honest, I didn’t at first and it cost me a lot of time. 😉

Anyhow, the flow looks as follows…

So basically;

• We’ll redirect the user to sign-in (and if this hasn’t been done, grant our application access)
• If all went well, we’ll receive an authorization code
• We’ll use this code to get a bearer (and refresh) token
• Next up we’ll use the bearer code to connect to the Azure REST API for getting the list of subscriptions for that user.