Recap/ Summary of Week #30

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Every beginning of weekend, I will share a recap of the week and at the same time a summary of my streams. Those videos are at least two hour longs, so I thought a short summary to know if topic interest you could be useful. Watch only the summary or relax and enjoy the longer version that up to you!

   

Reading Notes #435

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Cloud


Programming


Podcast


☁️

Recap / Summary of the week #29

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Every Friday, I will share a recap of the week and at the same time a summary of my streams. Those videos are at least two hour longs, so I thought a short summary to know if topic interest you could be useful.


Useful Links:


~☁️

How to Manage Azure Resources

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What ever you are on running on Linux, Mac or Windows that you are on the road or in the comfort of your office there is many different ways to manage your Azure resources. In this video I will show you five ways to do it and explain the pros and cons of each:

  1. Azure Portal
  2. Azure PowerShell
  3. Azure CLI
  4. Azure Mobile App
  5. Azure Cloud Shell

There is also an excellent Microsoft Learn module that will teach you how to use the Azure portal efficiently.

References

Reading Notes #434

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Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud


Programming


Podcasts


Miscellaneous


~☁️


Recap / Summary of the week #28

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This is some basic, sample markdown. Every Friday, starting now, I will share a recap of the week and at the same time a summary of my streams. Those videos are at least two hour longs, so I thought a short summary to know if topic interest you could be useful.


Useful Links:


~☁️

Reading Notes #433

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Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud


Programming


Podcast


Miscellaneous


☁

Reading Notes #432

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Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!


Cloud


Programming


Podcasts


Books

Add caption
Title: Badass: Making Users Awesome 

Author: Kathy Sierra 

ISBN: 9781491919019

I took me about one year to read that book. Way longer then it should. It was a good book and it is really easy to read. Maybe it's the fact that it was a "real" book and not in my kindle? But I think it was the format. This book look like a comic book with a director cut. There those little story bubbles and there is the text. The content is amazing, but I felt like I was always losing the vibe while transitioning to the text, or the bubbles. 

However, the book is really great

Reading Notes #431

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Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.

It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

Programming

Databases

Miscellaneous

Reading Notes #430

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Cloud

Programming

Podcast

  • Red Teaming with Leron Gray (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - A quite interesting episode about playing the bad guys for the good cause. I enjoyed each second of this episode. I new those them existed, but it's great to learn more about them.
  • Baking Bread with Eric Wolfinger (Wild Ideas Worth Living) - I've been doing my bread for probably fifteen years, and just recently start messing around with sourdoughs... I'm not crazy.. Making bread is both simple and complex... and of course so fun.

Miscellaneous


~

Reading Notes #429

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Suggestion of the week


Cloud


Programming

  • Remote Debugging .NET Containers (Karol Deland) - A nice tutorial that explains clearly first the difference between remote and local debugging and then explains how to do it.

Podcast


Miscellaneous

  • Screen Sharing with an Ultrawide Monitor (Kenny Lowe) - Really interesting post.As I think about getting a new screen and heard bad experiences sharing ultrawide screens this look like a nice solution.

Book


Vlog Like a Boss - How to Kill It Online with Video Blogging

Author: Amy Schmittauer Landino

An interesting book that shares the best practices about making videos today. How to plan, record, edit... What to do and not do. A quick, direct to the point and complete tutorial to get started. This book was done like today's videos.







~enjoy.

Reading Notes #428

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Frank in Kayak smilling at the camera
Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.

It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud


Programming


Miscellaneous

  • APIs in the 2020s Panel (.NET Rocks!) - A virtual panel of awesome speakers that talked about API, REST, GraphQL, oData and so more. Lovely episode.
  • 471: How to Say No Without Saying No, with Lois Frankel (Coaching for Leaders) - Saying No... being open. Really interesting topic. I put Lois Frankel: Nice Girls Don’t Speak Up or Stand Out in my to read list, that book maybe written for women in mind, but I think it is really interesting.
  • Leveraging Our Emotional Goals (Developer Tea) - An interesting episode that talk about goals and what we need to do (or not) to achieved them.
  • 203: Updating Open Source Projects (https://castbox.fm/episode/203%3A-Updating-Open-Source-Projects-id2117504-id267802246) - As I just create my first version in one of my open-source project I found the topic more than interesting... Thank you, great show.

Miscellaneous


Books

Cover of the Book The Impossible first.
  The Impossible First: From Fire to Ice—Crossing Antarctica Alone

  Author: Colin O'Brady

  An incredible adventure yes around the globe, but more important over the personal limits. I found this book very inspiring. I felt following him across the Antarctica... In the blizzard or in those deep moment. Great memoir, great adventure.





~enjoy!

 

Reading Notes #427

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Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.

It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. As you will quickly see This week is heavily tinted by the Microsoft Build event. I still have tons of videos to watch since I was was busy monitoring the chat during most of the performances.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud


Programming


Podcast

  • Chocolatey with Rob Reynolds (.NET Rocks!) - Awesome episode talking about all the good and the great of Chocolatey that awesome package manager.

Miscellaneous


~enjoy!

Reading Notes #426

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Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.

It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. You think you may have interesting content, share it!


Cloud

Programming


Podcasts

  • 5 Reasons It's Better to Be A Small Streamer - Twitch Tips (Stream Coach: Twitch Stream Tips | Partner Interviews | Pro Advice) - A nice episode that list some advantages of being a smaller streamer. I've been streaming for one year now, I'm pretty happy with my journey, learned a lot, and still learn so much. I don't feel disadvantaged, but that's maybe just because I don't really focus on growth.
  • 469: See What Really Matters, with Greg McKeown (Coaching for Leaders) - Nice episode that talks about the essential, how to find it, how to not pass over it. Very interesting. The book, Essentialism, from seems interesting too... And hop! On the to-read list.

Miscellaneous

~


Reading Notes #425

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Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.

It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

Programming

Shameless Plugs

Podcast

  • 070: Securing DevOps in the Cloud (CloudSkills.fm) - Great episode talking about security yes but also best practices and to change mindsets. Love it.
  • Running a successful dev shop with Martin Gratzer (Software Engineering Unlocked) - This show is one of my new favorites. Always interesting and very dynamic. This time it was about the hard reality of "dev shop". Very interesting, so true!
  • The Overreaction Paradox (Developer Tea) - I never thought about it that way... But it's so true. Are we celebrating the wrong things?
  • #34: Michael Jolley - The Fresh Prince of Live Coding [S02-E13] (The Solo Coder Podcast) - Okay, I'm a total fanboy of Michael... but how can you resist?! If you feel the passion inside you... Don't way, share, create, enjoy! Another great episode.
  • 197: I Need a Website (Merge Conflict) - They got me 50% of the time... I think they are talking to me: 'Frank we are ....'. Nice episode sharing some dreams about a perfect tool (aka website) for apps developers.
~

Simplify your deployment with nested Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates

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Most solutions, if not all, are composed of multiple parts: backend, frontend, services, APIs, etc. Because all parts could have a different life-cycle it's important to be able to deploy them individually. However, sometimes we would like to deploy everything at once. It's exactly the scenario I had in a project I'm working on where with backend and one frontend.

In this post, I will explain how I use nested Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates and conditions to let the user decide if he wants to deploy only the backend or the backend with a frontend of his choice. All the code will be available in GitHub and if you prefer, a video version is available below.
(This post is also available in French)

The Context


The project used in this post my open-source budget-friendly Azure URL Shortener. Like mentioned previously the project is composed of two parts. The backend leverage Microsoft serverless Azure Functions, it a perfect match in this case because it will only run when someone clicks a link. The second part is a frontend, and it's totally optional. Because the Azure Functions are HTTP triggers they act as an API, therefore, they can be called from anything able to do an HTTP call. Both are very easily deployable using an ARM template by a PowerShell or CLI command or by a one-click button directly from GitHub.

The Goal


At the end of this post, we will be able from one-click to deploy just the Azure Functions or to deploy them with a frontend of our choice (I only have one right now, but more will come). To do this, we will modify the "backend" ARM template using condition and nest the ARM template responsible for the frontend deployment.

The ARM templates are available here in there [initial](https://github.com/FBoucher/AzUrlShortener/tree/master/tutorials/optional-arm/before) and [final](https://github.com/FBoucher/AzUrlShortener/tree/master/tutorials/optional-arm/before/after) versions.

Adding New Inputs


We will nest the ARM templates, this means that our backend template (azureDeploy.json) will call the frontend template (adminBlazorWebsite-deployAzure.json). Therefore we need to add all the required information to azureDeploy.json to make sure it's able to deploy adminBlazorWebsite-deployAzure.json successfully. Looking at the parameter required for the second template, we only two need values AdminEMail and AdminPassword. All the other can be generated or we already have them.

We will need also another parameter the will act as our selection option. So let's add a parameter named frontend and allowed only two values: none and adminBlazorWebsite. If the value is none we only deploy the Azure Function. When the value is adminBlazorWebsite we will deploy the Azure Function, of course, but we will also deploy an admin website to go with it.

Following the best practices, we add clear detail and add those three parameters in the parameters section of the ARM template

"frontend": {
    "type": "string",
    "allowedValues": [
        "none",
        "adminBlazorWebsite"
    ],
    "defaultValue": "adminBlazorWebsite",
    "metadata": {
        "description": "Select the frontend that will be deploy. Select 'none', if you don't want any. Frontend available: adminBlazorWebsite, none. "
    }
},
"frontend-AdminEMail": {
    "type": "string",
    "defaultValue": "",
    "metadata": {
        "description": "(Required only if frontend = adminBlazorWebsite) The EMail use to connect into the admin Blazor Website."
    }
},
"frontend-AdminPassword": {
    "type": "securestring",
    "defaultValue": "",
    "metadata": {
        "description": "(Required only if frontend = adminBlazorWebsite) Password use to connect into the admin Blazor Website."
    }
}

Nested Templates


Let's assume for now that we always deploy the website when we deploy the Azure Function, to keep things simple. What we need now is to used nested ARM template, and that when you deploy an ARM template from inside another ARM template. This is done with a Microsoft.Resources/deployments node. Let's look at the code:

{
    "name": "FrontendDeployment",
    "type": "Microsoft.Resources/deployments",
    "dependsOn": [
        "[resourceId('Microsoft.Web/sites/', variables('funcAppName'))]",
        "[resourceId('Microsoft.Web/sites/sourcecontrols', variables('funcAppName'), 'web')]"
    ],
    "resourceGroup": "[resourceGroup().name]",
    "apiVersion": "2019-10-01",
    "properties": {
        "mode": "Incremental",
        "templateLink": {
            "uri": "[variables('frontendInfo')[parameters('frontend')].armTemplateUrl]"
        },
        "parameters": {
            "basename": {
                "value" : "[concat('adm', parameters('baseName'))]"
            },
            "AdminEMail": {
                "value" : "[parameters('frontend-AdminEMail')]"
            },
            "AdminPassword": {
                "value" : "[parameters('frontend-AdminPassword')]"
            },
            "AzureFunctionUrlListUrl": {
                "value" : "[concat('https://', reference(resourceId('Microsoft.Web/sites/', variables('funcAppName')), '2018-02-01').hostNames[0], '/api/UrlList?code=', listkeys(concat(resourceId('Microsoft.Web/sites/', variables('funcAppName')), '/host/default/'),'2016-08-01').functionKeys.default)]"
            },
            "AzureFunctionUrlShortenerUrl": {
                "value" : "[concat('https://', reference(resourceId('Microsoft.Web/sites/', variables('funcAppName')), '2018-02-01').hostNames[0], '/api/UrlShortener?code=', listkeys(concat(resourceId('Microsoft.Web/sites/', variables('funcAppName')), '/host/default/'),'2016-08-01').functionKeys.default)]"
            },
            "GitHubURL": {
                "value" : "[parameters('GitHubURL')]"
            },
            "GitHubBranch": {
                "value" : "[parameters('GitHubBranch')]"
            },
            "ExpireOn": {
                "value" : "[parameters('ExpireOn')]"
            },
            "OwnerName": {
                "value" : "[parameters('OwnerName')]"
            }

        }
    }
}

If we examine this node, we have the classic: name, type, dependsOn, resourceGroup, apiVersion. Here We really want the Azure Functions to be fully deployed so we need the FunctionApp to be created AND the GitHub sync to be complete, this is why there is also a dependency on Microsoft.Web/sites/sourcecontrols.

In properties we will pass the mode as Incremental as it will leave unchanged resources that exist in the resource group but aren't specified in the template.

Learn more about the Azure Resource Manager deployment modes here as they are very powerful.

The second property is templateLink. This is really important as it's the URL to the other ARM template. That URI must not be a local file or a file that is only available on your local network. You must provide a URI value that downloadable as HTTP or HTTPS. In this case, it's a variable that contains the GitHub URL where the template is available.

Finally, we have the parameters, and this is how we pass the values to the second template. Let's skip those where I just pass the parameter value from the caller to the called, and focus on basename, AzureFunctionUrlListUrl, and AzureFunctionUrlShortenerUrl.

For basename I just add a prefix to the parameter basename received, this way the resource names will be different but we can still see the "connection". That's purely optional, you could have added this value in a parameter to azureDeploy.json, I prefer keeping the parameters a minimum as possible as I think it simplifies the deployment for the users.

Finally for AzureFunctionUrlListUrl, and AzureFunctionUrlShortenerUrl I needed to retrieve the URL of the Azure Function with the security token because they are secured. I do that by concatenating different parts.

Component Value
Beginning of the URL 'https://'
Reference the Function App, return the value of hostname reference(resourceId('Microsoft.Web/sites/', variables('funcAppName')), '2018-02-01').hostNames[0]
Specify the Function targeted in this case UrlList. And starting the querystring to pass the code (aka. security token) '/api/UrlList?code='
Using the new listkeys function to retrieve the default Function key. listkeys(concat(resourceId('Microsoft.Web/sites/', variables('funcAppName')), '/host/default/'),'2016-08-01').functionKeys.default

Conditional parts


Now that the second ARM template can be deployed, let's add a condition so it gets, indeed, deploy only when we desire. To do this it's very simple, we need to add a property condition.

{
    "name": "FrontendDeployment",
    "type": "Microsoft.Resources/deployments",
    "condition": "[not(equals(parameters('frontend'), 'none'))]",
    "dependsOn": [
        "[resourceId('Microsoft.Web/sites/', variables('funcAppName'))]",
        "[resourceId('Microsoft.Web/sites/sourcecontrols', variables('funcAppName'), 'web')]"
    ]
}

In this case, is the value of the parameter is different then none, the nested template will be deployed. When a condition end-up being "false", the entire resource will be ignored during the deployment. How simple or complex are your conditions... that's your choice!

Happy deployment. :)




Reading Notes #424

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Suggestion of the week

Cloud

Programming

Podcasts

Miscellaneous

  • Visual Studio Codespaces (Nik Molnar) - I really like the new name I think it says more about what it is. And seriously how can I not like the new price! Less than 2$/day for a machine!

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