One of the first things IT departments do when they start moving workloads to the cloud, is stopping their VMs on a regular basis to safe money. There are plenty of functions and ways to do this, but I thought, a different approach might be fun too - building this as a micro service with several components on Azure.

Using Terraform has become mainstream at this point and I would like to share with you, how I like to structure my deployments.

When working with internal container deployments, there are many cases, where applications need to access an internal HTTPS service. If these services use internal certificates from an internal certificate authority (CA), the client (container/pod) needs to trust the certificate chain including the Sub/Issuing CA certificate and the Root CA certificate.
These certificates have to be added to the trusted ROOT CA store, which should not be done at runtime (hence not with a sidecar container or similar constructs). The solution to this problem would be to add them at build time. We will discover how this process can be simplified and automated by using Azure Container Registry (ACR) tasks.

This topic is not new and quite frankly, it is hard to believe this is still not integrated yet, but at some point, during your cloud journey, you probably want to send monitoring alerts to a certain Teams channel. Even though this is functionality is available for plenty of other services, Azure Monitor still lacks this.

Continuing the Azure Image Builder Series, we take a closer look at performing image network security customizations using an externally hosted Shell script, enforcing a password policy, installing a specific docker version and finally deploying the image to a Azure Shared Images Gallery.

Azure Image Builder is a virtual machine image provisioning service on Microsoft Azure based on HashiCorp Packer. It has been designed to integrate natively with Microsoft Azure to allow customers to easily create and maintain virtual machine images for consistent deployments. This post is the first of a series to introduce the Azure Image Builder and its benefits by means of showing real-world examples.

The Secret Management Solution HashiCorp Vault allows the Integration of a variety of Identity Providers. Although currently no direct Implementation for Human Users of Azure AD exists, the JWT/OIDC Auth Method provides a way to enable authentication and authorization for Azure AD Users to HashiCorp Vault. This post shows how to configure HashiCorp Vault to enable User Login with Azure AD Credentials as well as assigning Permissions/Policies based on their Group Memberships.

Since the my first post about Azure Hybrid DNS, I ran into a few more scenarios that I want to share with you.
In this post, I will go over the scenario in which you can use Azure Private DNS Zones as a sub-domain of your locally hosted DNS Zones.

At Microsoft Build 2020 lots of new updates and services were announced. Today we will take a look at a specific one that I am pretty excited about, Static Web Apps. Read on to learn what it is, how to use it and and why it helps us to reduce effort when deploying web applications to Microsoft Azure.

Azure private DNS is a great solution to simplify DNS resolution for cloud resources in Azure. However, chances are you have components in your infrastructure that do not natively integrate with Azure DNS zones. In this post, I will show you how you to enable your own DNS solution to resolve names from Azure private DNS zones with CoreDNS on Azure Kubernetes Service.