Availability tests in Application Insights

How to create availability tests for App Service using Bicep

One important aspect of any web application is its availability. Azure provides many tools that ensures your application is up and running, one of them being availability tests, which allow you to periodically check the availability of your application. You can also generate alerts should your web application become unavailable. You can configure availability tests and alerts in your Bicep templates, automating the entire process! In this article, we’ll create a Bicep template that provisions all the resources that we’ll need (the web app, Application Insights instance, action groups etc....

January 26, 2023 · 10 min · Will Velida
Scaling in Azure Container Apps

Scaling in Azure Container Apps

Azure Container Apps manages automatic horizontal scaling through declarative scaling rules. We can scale out our container apps based on a variety of different scalers. I recorded a video over the weekend covering how scaling works in Azure Container Apps, what KEDA is and how to set scaling rules within Azure Container Apps, using HTTP and Azure Queue storage scale rules as an example. If you prefer reading rather than watching, continue reading this post....

December 17, 2022 · 5 min · Will Velida
Azure Container Apps code with Dapr and ACA logo

Dapr Service Invocation with Azure Container Apps

I had a bit of time last week to do some Dapr learning, so I started to read the Dapr for .NET Developers e-book that’s available on our documentation (completely free by the way!). In one of the early chapters, the book outlines a tutorial that you can run locally to use service invocation to communicate between to two applications. Running locally is fairly straightforward, so I wanted to deploy the two applications as Container Apps, since it has support for Dapr in the platform....

November 6, 2022 · 8 min · Will Velida
Using Microsoft Security DevOps tasks in GitHub Action worflow files

Configure Bicep code scanning in GitHub with Microsoft Defender for DevOps

Microsoft Defender for DevOps is a new capability in Defender for Cloud that provides visibility across multiple DevOps environments that you can use to centrally manage DevOps security, strengthen your infrastructure as code and help you prioritize critical issues in code across your pipeline and multiple cloud environments. This feature is currently in preview, and supports GitHub and AzureDevOps (with support for more platforms coming soon). As part of my job at Microsoft, I spend a lot of time helping engineers to use infrastructure as code to provision their resources to Azure, and help them to build pipelines that automates their deployments....

October 20, 2022 · 5 min · Will Velida
AKS, ACR and Bicep Lang logs

Creating a Azure Kubernetes cluster with an attached Azure Container Registry with Bicep

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) simplifies deploying a managed Kubernetes cluster into Azure by offloading the operational overhead to Azure. Azure Container Registry allows you to build, store and manage container images in a private registry, from which you can pull your images into your AKS cluster. Azure Container Registry integrates with AKS. We can attach container registries to our AKS clusters using an Azure Active Directory managed identity. We can then assign that managed identity will the AcrPull role assignment that allows our AKS cluster to pull images from our Azure Container Registry....

September 11, 2022 · 8 min · Will Velida