Bicep

How much text data do you produce on a daily basis? This could be in the form of an email you send to a colleague, or posts you send on social media. You may have gone to a new restaurant and given them a review online, or you could have created some documents such as contracts as part of your work. Now imagine all that data being created on a global scale. How can we apply AI to this vast amount of text data to extract insights from it? ...

Azure Cognitive Search is a search service in Azure that gives you as a developer the tools for building search experiences over private data in your enterprise, web and mobile applications. Common use cases for search can include any scenario that surfaces text to users, such as searching a product catalog, or searching documents within your organization. Azure Search provides you with a bunch of cool capabilities, including: Full text and vector search over search indexes containing your content. Indexing, with optional AI enhancement for extracting and transforming your content. Query syntax for text search, autocomplete, geo-search, vector queries and more. Access to search via SDKs and REST APIs Integration with Azure AI services. In this article, I’ll cover what Azure Cognitive Search is, what components make up Azure Search, and where it can fit within your architecture. We’ll then create a Cognitive Search service using Bicep along with a storage account that we will pull our data from into the index. Once that’s deployed, we’ll start to work with our Cognitive Search service using C#, creating our data source for our indexer, creating the index and then querying our index with some simple queries. ...

As I’ve been working on my side project, I’ve been trying to work on my CI/CD skills and deploy all my resources through GitHub Actions. This project is made up of a couple of services, which each have their own infrastructure and application code. I’m deploying my resources to a single resource group in Azure. To deploy infrastructure to Azure via GitHub Actions, we need to authenticate to our Azure subscription. Via the command line, we can do this using PowerShell or the CLI, but that’s possible due to us being able to interact with the authentication process. ...

What are virtual networks? As you look to move workloads to the cloud, it’s important to have a secure and scalable network infrastructure that can support your applications. In Azure, this is where virtual networks come in. Virtual networks (VNet for short) are the fundamental building block for your private network in Azure. They enable many types of Azure resources to communicate with each other, the internet and on-prem networks securely. You can also use VNets to filter and route network traffic. ...

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.) and then disable our web application to trigger the alerts when our application is unavailable. ...