Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!
Author: Jasper Siegmund
[Azure] What outputs can I use for my ARM templates?
ARM templates are a good way of deploying your infrastructure to Azure as if it were code (it sort of is, actually). Basically you provide a JSON file along with a parameter file and Azure starts creating stuff for you. For more information on how this works (as that’s pretty well documented), check out this link.
One of the options you have when using these templates, is using the outputs section. The outputs section basically tells the deployment task to output some information, which you can then use for whatever purpose you need it. Simple example: suppose you’re deploying an application that relies on a service bus. You’ll need to deploy the bus first, and the application will require a connectionstring to figure out where the bus lives. Using outputs, you can do the following:
- Deploy the service bus, defining an output variable for the connectionstring
- Deploy the application, replacing a token in the configuration file with the actual connectionstring
When you have a pipeline set-up in VSTS (or any other deployment tool), this is dead simple. The cool thing: you don’t have to worry about runtime configuration any more, as your pipeline will ensure everything is set-up in the right way. Nice, right?
Here’s an example of an outputs section:
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"outputs": { "NamespaceConnectionString": { "type": "string", "value": "[listkeys(variables('authRuleResourceId'), variables('sbVersion')).primaryConnectionString]" } } |
Working with these output, I was trying to figure out which outputs I could actually use. Some articles give examples of which you can copy stuff, but not all of them do so. In the above example, .primaryConnectionString is apparently a property you can use. So how do you know which properties there are!?
The answer is one in the “duh…” category, but it took me some time to figure this out nonetheless. Basically, the resource you are creating determines the properties you can use. Every resource type has a corresponding Get-AzureRm<ResourceType> Powershell cmdlet (or CLI, etc.). To find the type, simply check your template for the “type”: “Microsoft.ServiceBus/namespaces” section. In this case it’s a servicebus namespace, so the corresponding cmdlet would be Get-AzureRmServiceBusNamespace. Run that one and you have your list of properties to pick from, including the option to use a property of one of the child objects. Hope it helps!
[Azure] News for Developers, May 2018
Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!
[Azure] News for Developers, April 2018
Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!
[VSTS] Using Process Parameters in Release Definitions
Building some release pipelines for my current project, I was faced with an inconvenience. When using a lot of Azure related tasks, in my case “Azure Resource Group Deployment” tasks, each of those tasks require a connection to your Azure subscription to function. Now you could just configure the connection for each task and be done with it. But I really HATE dislike repetitive work and also didn’t fancy the maintenance effort when I would need to change anything in the future. So I went looking for a better way to do this.
What I wanted to achieve: define the Azure subscription connection once per environment so that I can still have difference subscriptions for Test, Acceptance and Production; but not having to specify it for each task individually.
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[Azure] News for Developers, March 2018
Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!
[Azure] Regain admin access to your Azure AD tenant custom domain
Let me start by admitting something: I really made a mess of my Azure AD tenants over time 🙂 If you’re career is anything like mine, you probably know how it is to have multiple Azure subscriptions, MSDN subscriptions and Azure AD tenants (which are at the root of all of your Azure activities). And since it’s spring time and all, I decided it could use a little cleaning up. And so I started moving stuff over to the subscriptions I want to use and deleting the left overs.
Somewhere in this process I might have been a little bit too enthused about throwing stuff away. And I ended up with the following situation:
- I had an Azure AD tenant, linked to one of my custom domains.
- The subscription linked to the tenant was deleted (or expired, not sure).
- Within the tenant I had only one user left, which was user, not admin.
[Azure] News for Developers, January 2018
Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!
[Azure] News for Developers, December 2017
First of all I’d like to start by wishing everyone a very happy 2018! 2017 was a great year and I’m sure that 2018 will also have some great new things to come! Traditionally December doesn’t bring us that much news so this edition is a little shorter than what you’re used to.
Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!
[Azure] News for Developers, November 2017
Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!
