Erwin Staal

Whenever you create a new SQL Database on the Azure Cloud, one of the first things you probably do is set the ‘Allow Azure services and resources to access this server’-switch to ‘Yes’. This allows your App Service for example to access your database. It’s not very secure however since all an attacker then needs is your connections string. And although you are probably very careful with that, it might just accidentally get public.

Everyone knows it’s completely normal nowadays to have your website loaded over https. Troy Hunt explains why. There are quite some examples out there on how to use Let’s Encrypt certificates on your Azure web app, see this one by Henry Been for example. For most of us that’s a perfect and free solutions. It doesn’t work for all of us however.

Azure Cloud Service was one of the earliest Platform as a Service offerings by Microsoft Azure. With Cloud Services you can run web applications or run background applications. Since it is a PaaS offering, you dot not need to worry about the issues that comes with IaaS, patching for example and they offer a lot of flexibility. They are not officially deprecated, though Microsoft is pushing for the use of other PaaS offerings.

Azure KeyVault is a great Azure offerring that allows you to store for example secrets or certificates. You are currently looking at the first post out of a series of posts on how to grab secrets or certificates from KeyVault in your web applications. This post wil focus on creating the KeyVault, giving access to you Azure Web App and retrieving a secret in two different ways. I will be using an ASP.

A few months ago I build a Raspberry Pi cluster running K3S. I build it because I wanted to have a nice environment the learn more about Kubernetes and OpenFaas. It always feels nice to have something you can actually touch in this all software world I normally live in. After tweeting and giving a session about my OpenFaas Raspberry Pi cluster people started asking what parts the cluster consists of and what software I use to run it.

Whenever you want to create a new function to run on OpenFaas your starting point would be an OpenFaas template. OpenFaas has a template engine build-in which can create new functions in a given programming language. There are the official/default templates and there are templates in the store provided by the community. If a language you would like to use isn’t available or it doesn’t suite your needs, you can always write your own!

In my previous blog I described how to set-up OpenFaas on a Kubernetes cluster with a little help from Rancher. Now it’s time to deploy our first serverless function. In this blog we’ll create and deploy a .NET Core function that reads a bit of config using both an environment variable and Kubernetes secrets. Creating your first function In the previous blog we installed the OpenFaas cli. If you didn’t already, here are the instructions.

A step that is very common in almost every deployment pipeline is the migration of the database. In this blog I’ll show you how to do this using Octopus Deploy and Entity Framework Migrations. I’ll be using a very simple ASP.Net MVC application called SimpleMVCApp. In the same solution, I’ve created a library project named SimpleMVCApp.Data in which my context, models, migrations and migration scripts reside. This application can be found on my GitHub account.

Bij SnelStart ontwikkelen we boekhoudsoftware voor het midden en klein bedrijf. SnelStart doet dat al meer dan 30 jaar door middel van een desktopapplicatie en sinds kort ook met een online variant. Ongeveer drie jaar geleden zijn we bij SnelStart begonnen met de ontwikkeling van ons service platform. Dit is een Azure Cloud oplossing die onze klanten onder andere de mogelijkheid geeft om in te loggen vanuit hun desktop- of webapplicatie, online administraties aan te maken en belastingaangiften te versturen.