Cloud & Engineering

We regularly write about our technical experiences (good and bad) and what we're learning from the market.

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6 Ways Passing Secrets to ARM Templates

Posted by Justin Yoo on 24 April 2019

Azure Resource Manager, ARM Templates, DevOps, Azure Key Vault, Azure Pipelines, YARM CLI, Azure DevOps, Linked Templates

Whenever you deal with ARM templates, you always face to handle some sensitive information. This is mainly for API keys handling. How can you cope with those values other than hard-code them into the templates? There are six different ways to handle them we’re going to discuss in this post.

1. Use ARM Template...

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Writing ARM Templates in YAML

Posted by Justin Yoo on 07 August 2018

CICD, JSON, VSTS, ARM Templates, Testing, Pester, Blog, Technology, YAML

In my previous post, ARM Template Lifecycle Management: DOs and DON’Ts, I recommend to consider YAML for ARM template authoring. In the post, I also suggest using yarm to convert YAML to JSON and/or vice-versa. However, yarm is not that easy to use because it has to be deployed to Azure or, at least, it has to be run...

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Testing ARM Templates with Pester #2 – Azure CLI

Posted by Justin Yoo on 11 July 2018

Architecture, VSTS, ARM Templates, Azure PowerShell, Testing, Pester, Blog, Technology, Azure CLI

In my previous post, Testing ARM Templates with Pester #1 – PowerShell, I showed how to test behaviours ARM template deployment without actual deployment. At the end of the post, I also briefly mentioned how we can integrate this testing into our CI/CD pipeline. However, I was actually asked many times how I did it on

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ARM Template Lifecycle Management: DOs and DON'Ts

Posted by Justin Yoo on 18 June 2018

Architecture, ARM Templates, DevOps, Article, Technology, Best Practice

Introduction

Are you an experienced DevOps engineer or managing cloud resources on Azure, or about to jump into Azure resource management?

While you are creating, updating or deleting resources on Azure, you must have worked with Azure Resource Managerthat keeps all resource definitions known asARM templates. In...

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Separation of Concerns: Logic App from ARM Template

Posted by Justin Yoo on 13 June 2018

Architecture, Logic Apps, ARM Templates, Blog, Technology, Latest Post, Separation of Concerns

Introduction

Azure Logic App is a set of workflow definitions, which is written in JSON format. The nature of JSON object results in this being tightly bound with ARM template. In other words, the Logic App has a dependency on an ARM template. Due to these characteristics, when any update is made on the workflow, the...

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Azure API Management CI/CD Best Practices

Posted by Grant Samuels on 13 April 2018

Azure API Management, Continuous Integration, Microsoft, VSTS, ARM Templates, Article, Technology

Introduction

Azure API Management is a great product that we often use on customer solutions. It is an extremely effective way to provide a layer of abstraction between your callers and back-end APIs, and provides centralised governance across your API surface.

However, one of the most common questions from our...

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Testing ARM Templates with Pester #1 - PowerShell

Posted by Justin Yoo on 22 January 2018

ARM Templates, Testing, Pester, Blog, Technology

ARM template is a great tool for Azure resources deployment. However, it’s very tricky to use because:

  • It’s a JSON object with massive number of lines,
  • Its JSON structure is quite complex so that it’s not that easy to read at a glance,
  • It’s hard to validate if there is a typo or not, and
  • We only know if the resource...
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List of Access Keys from Output Values after ARM Template Deployment

Posted by Justin Yoo on 05 January 2018

Azure Functions, Logic Apps, Service Bus, ARM Templates, Application Insights, Cosmos DB, Storage Account, Blog, Technology

There are many cases that we need to retrieve access keys and/or endpoints of Azure resources, as soon as they are deployed through ARM templates. Typical uses cases are:

  1. To display those values in the outputs section of ARM templates,
  2. To get a reference to the outputs section of nested ARM templates from their...
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Preparing Azure Logic Apps for CI/CD using ARM Templates

Posted by Paco de la Cruz on 11 October 2017

Azure, Continuous Integration, Logic Apps, ARM Templates, Blog, Technology

Introduction

Logic Apps can be created from the Azure Portal, or using Visual Studio. This works well if you want to create one Logic App at a time. However, if you want to deploy the same Logic App in multiple environments, e.g. Dev, Test, or Production, you want to do it in an automated way. Azure Resource Manager...

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