Fantail IO

Snapshot of my Environment Tear-up Release Phase I was using a VSTS release pipeline to build an Azure environment today with ARM Templates, and needed to set up a secure connection from a Web App to a Blob Storage account so the app could write logs. As with a lot of things in ARM, you can set up the connection and grab the template, but then you end up having a fixed access URL (SAS URL, or Shared Access Signature) in your JSON file: This is bad from a portability and security point of view, as the URL only gives access to one named account, but if you have that URL you can write whatever you want to storage. This URL will also expire in around a year's time - which will mean your site suddenly stops working like it used to!  That'll be an fun and interesting day. Fortunately its easy to create a SAS URL and pass it to a script as a parameter.  This PowerShell will create the access token: $rg = "my-storage-resource-group" $name = "mystorageacc...

I've been working with Azure Resource Manager templates a lot lately, as an easy, repeatable way to create deployment environments for my code.  ARM templates are a JSON description of a resource or grouping of resources and can be applied to create or update an environment.  This means you can roll out a new environment quickly and easily - perfect for quickly setting up a Dev or Test system, and you know that if you use the same templates to configure Production you won't have any surprises, or "Well, it worked in Dev..." conversations. The best thing about ARM templates for me is how easy it is to generate them.  If you have a resource group, you can create a template by clicking on the Automation Script button: This will create a show you a JSON template and supporting files that can be downloaded as a Zip.  It contains all the information needed to reproduce your resource group's infrastructure.  It isn't a backup though - it doesn't have the we...