While you can create an Azure Storage account with an ARM template very quickly, it’s not been possible to create anything inside this storage account, such as blob containers, tables, queues, using the same ARM template. If you wanted to do this, you either needed to look at running scripts after your template completes, or using something like Terraform, which does allow you to create these things.
However, a recent update to the ARM schema means you can now create Blob containers in your template.
Azure Active Directory is not Active Directory! If you’ve been working with Azure for a while you likely already know this, but this topic is something I see over and over again with people who are getting started with Azure. Azure Active Directory is not a cloud version of Active Directory, and in fact, it bears minimal resemblance to its on-premises namesake at all.
The question I see over and over again with people new to Azure, I even answered this question just this week, is “how do I join my servers to Azure AD?
Azure has offered the ability to get static public IP addresses for many years now, however when you request an IP you will receive one from the general pool of available addresses and it is very unlikely you will receive multiple IPs in the same range. A new preview feature announced at Ignite changes this, called Public IP Address Prefixes.
Instead of requesting a single static IP you can request a Prefix, which will give you a contiguous range of IP addresses.
Last weeks Ignite conference came with lots of new Azure announcements if you want to see them all make sure to check out my announcement summary. One of these announcements that seem to go somewhat under the radar was Azure Resource Graph, but I think this could be a handy tool for Azure administrators.
Resource graph as a new service which allows you to explore your Azure resources using a command line tool and a new query language.
This week (24th to the 28th September) is Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference, which means lots of announcement about new Azure features. We’re going to dive into a number of these in detail over the next few weeks, but in this article, you can see a summary of the key announcements that relate to Azure. I’ll be updating this over the course of the week to add new announcements and to add links to services as the documentation gets released.
Managed Identity (MI) service has been around for a little while now and is becoming a standard for providing applications running in Azure access to other Azure resources. We’re going to be taking a look at using MI in a few areas in the future, such as Kubernetes pods, so before we do, I thought it was worth a primer on MI.
Managed Service Identity has recently been renamed to Managed Identity.
Ever since they were released, ARM templates required you to supply the name of the Resource Group you want to deploy to as part the deployment command. This restriction meant that the Resource Group always needed to exist before running your deployment. I mentioned in my article on Terraform that one of the advantages of this is that you can create the resource group as part of your deployment template, no need to create it separately.
At some point, I imagine most people working with Azure VMs have hit issues with being able to connect to services running inside a vNet. A lot of the time these issues boil down to the configuration of Network Security Groups to allow traffic into the VM. The process of troubleshooting these issues and determining which NSG and which NSG rule is at fault can be time-consuming, especially with complex networks.
In any application it is likely you are going to need access to some “secret” data, connection strings, API keys, passwords etc. It is essential that the applications that need them can access these secrets, but that they are also kept secure. One way of doing this is using Azure Keyvault; this is a secure store which can hold secrets, keys and certificates and allow applications to access them securely. Generally, Keyvault Secrets are accessed by the application making a call to the KeyVault API and providing the appropriate credentials (username/password, certificate or managed service identity).
I’m presenting a session this weekend at SQL Saturday Manchester on how to deal with lack of SQL agent when moving to Azure SQL. This session looks at options in Azure for running regular jobs against SQL databases and usually focusses on using Azure Automation and Azure functions. However, just a couple of weeks before the event Microsoft released a new service that could also be used to fill this gap, SQL Elastic Jobs, and so I needed to squeeze that into my presentation last minute.
