Azure

Cleaning up stale images (images that you’re not using) from your Azure Container Registry is important for a couple of reasons. First off, storing images in ACR isn’t free. Even with the Basic SKU, once you go past your 10GB limit, you end up paying $0.00516 AUD (at the time of writing) per GB of additional storage. If you have container images that are just sitting there not being used, it’ll waste money and second, it’ll be difficult to manage your images. ...

As part of my AKS lab, I wanted to see how I can enforce compliance on workloads and my AKS control plane so I get into the habit of creating secure and compliant sandbox environments. We can achieve this with Azure Policy! So in this article, I’ll cover: What Azure Policy is. How it integrates with Azure Kubernetes Service. How we can enable Azure Policy for our AKS cluster with Terraform How we can apply and test policies to our AKS Cluster How we can check the overall compliance state for our cluster in the Azure Portal. What is Azure Policy? Azure Policy allows us to manage the state of compliance of our Azure services. It compares the state of your resources to the business rules that you define in Azure Policy. This can include enforcing resource tags on your resources, limiting the types of services you can use in Azure and where you can deploy them. ...

I’m building my own Azure Kubernetes Cluster that I can use for my personal development, and I’ve been wanting to improve my Terraform skills, so I’ve spent a bit of time over the past couple of days getting a Terraform deployment to work with GitHub Actions. The AzureRM provider has moved on a bit since I’ve used it in anger, so I learnt a lot about the different resources that are available, and how we can use GitHub Actions to deploy Terraform templates to Azure. ...

Azure Container Apps allows your apps to secure sensitive configuration values as secrets. Once you define your secrets, you can pass them as configuration to revisions of your Container Apps, and as secured values to your scale rules. In this article, I’ll discuss what secrets are, where we can define secrets, and how we can reference them in our application’s environment variables. If you want to watch a video that talks about these concepts, check out the video below! ...

In my last post on Semantic Kernel, I talked about how we interact with large language models (LLMs) through plugins that run with NLP prompts. We can also create plugins using native code. We can use our code to integrate with LLMs for calculations, data manipulation or any other functionality that our applications require. In this article, I’ll talk about how we can use native functions in the Semantic Kernel SDK, how we can create native function plugins, and how we can combine native functions with prompts. ...