The Cloud Blog

Serverless Visitor Counter Badge with Azure Functions

Nov 22, 2020 · 7 min read

We all love web badges. You might have spotted many of them in README of repositories, including the repository of my blog, The Cloud Blog. In general, web badges serve two purposes. They are visually appealing. They display key information instantly. If you scroll to my website’s footer section, you will find GitHub and Netlify badges that display the status of the latest build and deployment. I use them to quickly check whether everything is fine with the world without navigating to their dashboards.

#azure #compute

Simplifying Terraform Deployments with Ansible - Part 2

Nov 13, 2020 · 10 min read

In this series Motivation & Ansible 101 Terraform & Ansible I am happy to see that many people are enthusiastic about this series and wish to make their IaC applications better with Ansible. What I intend to do is very simple. I will write an Ansible playbook that uses the template module (see Templating with Jinja2) and a little magic of Jinja2 templates to load appropriate variables and configurations for each Terraform environment.

#devops

Simplifying Terraform Deployments with Ansible - Part 1

Nov 03, 2020 · 5 min read

In this series Motivation & Ansible 101 Terraform & Ansible Enterprise developers are responsible for deploying infrastructure to multiple environments, such as development, staging, and production. One core problem with configurations in Terraform is that with the number of environments and variables, the number of “.tfvars” files used to manage configurations will increase. Several tools, such as Puppet, Chef, and Ansible, help simplify the management of configurations.

#devops

Monitoring Health of ASP.NET Core Background Services with TCP Probes on Kubernetes

Oct 24, 2020 · 9 min read

Many microservices applications require background tasks and scheduled jobs to process requests asynchronously. In the .NET Core ecosystem, background services are called Hosted services because a single host, such as a web host or a console host, can run several such services in the background while it is alive. In terms of implementation, a hosted service is required to implement the IHostedService interface. You can implement the IHostedService interface yourself, or even better, leverage the BackgroundService class that implements some common concerns such as cancellation token management and error propagation to the host for you.

#programming #kubernetes

Generating Dynamic Open Graph Images with Azure Functions

Oct 08, 2020 · 6 min read

Open Graph (OG) tags allow you to control what content shows up when you share the webpage on major social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. The essential Open Graph properties that you must configure in the <head> section of your webpage are the following. og:title: The title of your webpage. og:image: An image URL displayed as the thumbnail of your webpage when it is shared. The recommended dimension of this image is 1200px X 627 px.

#azure #compute

Integration Tests for gRPC Services in ASP.NET Core

Oct 01, 2020 · 6 min read

The default implementation of the gRPC on .NET - Grpc.net is built on Grpc.Core which uses the protoc tool (see: ProtoCompilerOutput) to generate C# artifacts from .proto files. Also, it adds complexity to testing the services and sharing the contracts with clients. The proto files are artifacts/files shared between the clients and the server that need to be managed and kept synced between the two parties. It is important to note that protobuf is simply a serialization format, and it is not dependent on proto files.

#programming

Enable TLS on HTTP Triggered Function App in Kubernetes Using KEDA and NGINX

Sep 26, 2020 · 4 min read

With KEDA (Kubernetes-based Event-Driven Autoscaling), you can host Azure Functions on Kubernetes. KEDA allows you to scale pods based on configurable rules that rely on metrics from data sources such as Azure Queue. The Microsoft documentation outlines how you can use the Prometheus scaler to scale HTTP triggered Azure functions. However, it does not discuss the the security of the transport channel in detail. This quick tip will demonstrate how you can expose your HTTP triggered Azure Functions over TLS/SSL (HTTPS endpoint).

#azure #kubernetes

Dynamic Admission Control in AKS with Azure Functions

Sep 20, 2020 · 15 min read

This article is part of #ServerlessSeptember. You’ll find other helpful articles, detailed tutorials, and videos in this all-things-Serverless content collection. New articles from community members and cloud advocates are published every week from Monday to Thursday through September. Find out more about how Microsoft Azure enables your Serverless functions at https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/azure-functions/. Nov 02,2020: The implementation of validating webhook Azure Function that uses Azure Communication Service is available in the feature/impl-azure-comm-service branch.

#azure #kubernetes #compute

No Code Incident Management System with Azure Logic Apps

Sep 06, 2020 · 8 min read

In this lab, we will create an Azure Logic App that monitors Twitter, analyzes the sentiment of customer tweets with Text Analytics v2 service, and creates incidents in Pager Duty. PagerDuty is an incident management platform that provides reliable notifications, automatic escalations, on-call scheduling, and other functionality to help teams detect and fix problems quickly. This application can help customer service agents react swiftly to customer complaints and avoid brand reputation damages.

#azure #integration

Cheapskate’s Journey to On-Demand Load Tests on Heroku with Locust

Jun 20, 2020 · 17 min read

I want to stretch every dollar that I spend on the cloud. I run a handful of web applications on Heroku, and like everyone else, run a suite of smoke tests and load tests on every release increment in a non-production environment. Load tests are important: they help us not only to understand the limits of our systems but also bring up issues that arise due to concurrency, which often escape the realms of unit tests and integration tests.

#azure #heroku #devops #programming