azure

Microsoft has this week revealed that by the end of 2023, Azure AD will be known as Entra ID, joining the other identity products already in the Entra suite. In a post on the Microsoft blog, Joy Chik, President, Identity & Network Access said that Entra ID will join Entra Permissions Management, Entra Verified ID, Entra ID Governance and Entra Workload ID. “To simplify our product naming and unify our product family, we’re changing the name of Azure AD to Microsoft Entra ID,” Chik wrote....

Once you start adopting a cloud service such as Microsoft Azure, one of the first tasks should be looking at how to enforce organisational and best-practice policies at scale when resources are being created. Fortunately Microsoft makes enforcing policies relatively straightforward via a service called Azure Policy. It combines a number of best practice, out-of-the-box policies with the ability for you to also create your own custom policy definitions. You can setup guardrails and enforce compliance easily....

Are you looking to become certified in Azure DevOps? If so, read on to find out more about what official Microsoft certifications are available. The pathway to Azure DevOps certification The first certification you’ll want to get is for Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900). This covers the basics about Azure, including generic cloud concepts as well as more targeted Azure information such as pricing and a high-level overview of available services. Note that the content for Fundamentals changed on October 25, 2021 so you might want to check the skills measured list to ensure you’re still studying the right materials....

Do you have multiple Azure Application Insights instances that you’d like to query at once? Perhaps you’re trying to see all errors across multiple environments, each with their own App Insights instance? When using the Azure Portal, querying multiple instances is straightforward. How to query across multiple App Insight instances First, login to the Azure portal using your Microsoft work, school or personal account credentials. Navigate to one of the App Insight instances you’d like to run a query against....

Bicep is a new language from Microsoft that allows you to easily specify your Azure infrastructure as code. It’s an improvement on writing Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates directly by better supporting features such as type safety and code modularity and reuse. That said, Bicep still has a very close relationship with ARM templates. In fact, it’s an abstraction over ARM templates with templates written using Bicep able to be transpiled back to ARM templates....

Need to deploy your app to an Azure app service, and rely on a database such as Postgres or Azure SQL? Microsoft is now previewing a new blade in the Azure portal that lets you quickly spin up an Azure app service with an associated database. Supported database engines for the preview are Postgres or serverless Azure SQL server. To get started using the new blade, click here or search the Azure Marketplace for “web app database”....

If you’re manually creating infrastructure for your next app in Azure, you should consider using an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template. An ARM template is essentially a JSON file that describes the infrastructure you want to create in the Azure cloud. It can be run as many times as you like to spin up identically-configured environments. Create the template The first step when using an ARM template is to create the template file....

If you’re using an Azure App Service on a tier that offers staging slots (standard and above) then you might want to consider what happens when you swap a slot. If you’ve configured a slot then you’ll want to swap deployments at a minimum between a production and pre-production environment. Microsoft cover in depth what happens when you commence a swap, but what they don’t cover is what happens to any managed identities that you have setup for the app service....

A common question for newcomers to Microsoft’s Azure platform is what’s the difference between an availability zone and an availability set? An availability zone is a unique physical location within one Azure region, and provides high-availability for your application and infrastructure. Each zone is independent and has physically isolated power, cooling, and networking from other zones within the same region. Different Azure services have varying levels of support for availability zones....

If you’re storing files in Azure Storage, you’ll likely soon find that the cost of bandwidth will soon become one of the more expensive items in your Azure bill. By using a content delivery network (CDN), you can improve performance for those accessing your files from around the world, while also reducing the bandwidth costs incurred on Azure. Microsoft offers its own Azure CDN solution, or you can use Akamai or Verizon....