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”....

Google recently launched a new product called Tables - a lightweight database similar to the likes of Airtable. However being in beta, and launched by Google’s incubator Area 120, it’s only officially available in the United States for now. But if you’re outside the US, at least for now you can still access Tables using the following method. Note that the usual caveats apply, in that Google may block this at any time and your success may vary....

Google - through its incubator Area 120 - recently announced its own Airtable competitor, Tables. In this post we’ll take a look at how you can get started with Tables. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv2Fzs8hOX8&t=54s Meet Google Tables What is Google Tables? Think of Tables as a lightweight spreadsheet, similar to Microsoft Access database, or a competitor to Airtable. Using bots, you can create automations that do everything from emailing people when rows are added or changed, to modifying other rows or posting to a webhook....

So your team is looking to start using Microsoft Teams as a form of internal communication? We’ve compiled a list of the best Microsoft Teams training resources for getting everyone up to speed about how to make the most out of the service. While this list is far from conclusive, many of the resources below cover end-user and admin training, while some are more targeted to one scenario or the other....

Are you trying to edit a variable group in an Azure DevOps Library, and getting the error “you do not have permission to create a variable group within library”? Continue on to find out how to rectify this issue. The problem DevOps project settings - these don’t apply to variable groups Variable groups within Azure DevOps can have different permissions to your project settings. This can be useful to limit the number of people who can view and edit your config values, but can be confusing....

Ever heard someone mention the Microsoft Graph and not known what it is? In this article, we’ll dive deeper into what the graph is and what it can provide you access to. What is the Microsoft Graph? In a nutshell, the Microsoft Graph is designed to be a one-stop shop (ie a single endpoint) for interacting with the Microsoft suite of products. For now it’s limited to only a subset of Microsoft’s product range, but Microsoft has grand ambitions for continuing to grow this over time....

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....

Azure DevOps provides a number of predefined system variables out of the box on hosted build agents. While these have officially always been read-only, informally you’ve previously been able to change the value of a predefined system variable by overwriting it in a pipeline task. However, as of the January 28 2020 DevOps release this is no longer the case. The DevOps team have improved the security of system variables, and as such now actively prohibit system variables from being written to....

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....