Back in April this year, Pete Zerger (@pzerger) and I delivered two sessions in Experts Live Australia. One of which is titled “Cloud Automation Overview”. During this session, we have showed off a pretty cool voting demo app that is made up with Azure Functions, Key Vault, Azure SQL DB and Power BI. As shown above, this demo app allows attendees in our session to vote on a topic that we have chosen by scanning QR codes using mobile devices. In this case, since we were delivering the session in Melbourne Australia, we have decided to let people to vote
Continue readingSearch Results for: azure function
Feeding Your Power BI Reports from Azure Functions
Background Few days ago my good friend and fellow CDM MVP Alex Verkinderen (@AlexVerkinderen) had a requirement to produce a Power BI dashboard for Azure AD users. so Alex and I started discussing a way to produce such report in Power BI. After exploring various potential possibilities, we have decided to leverage Azure Functions to feed data into Power BI. You can check out the Power BI solution Alex has built on his blog here: http://www.mscloud.be/retrieve-azure-aad-user-information-with-azure-functions-and-publish-it-into-powerbi In this blog post, I’m not going to the details of how the AAD Users Power BI report was built. Instead, I will focus
Continue readingMaking PowerShell Based Azure Functions to Produce HTML Outputs
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working with my MVP buddy Alex Verkinderen (@AlexVerkinderen) on some Azure Function related stuff. We have both written few PowerShell based functions that output a HTML page. These functions use the ConvertTo-HTML cmdlet to produce the HTML output. For example, here’s a simple one that list 2 cars in a HTML table: $Cars = @() #Car #1 $CarProperties = @{ ‘Make’ = ‘BMW’ ‘Colour’ = ‘Black’ ‘RegistrationNumber’ = ‘ABC123’ } $Cars += New-Object psobject -Property $CarProperties #Car #2 $CarProperties = @{ ‘Make’ = ‘Toyota’ ‘Colour’ = ‘Red’ ‘RegistrationNumber’ = ‘DEF456’ } $Cars +=
Continue readingSecuring Passwords in Azure Functions
09/10/2016 – Note: This post has been updated as per David O’Brien’s suggestion . As I mentioned in my last post, I have started playing with Azure Functions few weeks ago and I’ve already built few pretty cool solutions. One thing that I’ve spent a lot of time doing research on is how to secure credentials in Azure Functions. Obviously, Azure Key Vault would be an ideal candidate for storing credentials for Azure services. If I’m using another automation product that I’m quite familiar with – Azure Automation, I’d certainly go down the Key Vault path because Since Azure Automation
Continue readingUsing Custom PowerShell Modules in Azure Functions
Like many other fellow MVPs, I have started playing with Azure Functions over the last few weeks. Although Azure Functions are primarily designed for developers and supports languages such as C#, Node.JS, PHP, etc. PowerShell support is currently in preview. This opens a lot of opportunities for IT Pros. My friend and fellow CDM MVP David O’Brien has written some really good posts on PowerShell in Azure Functions (https://david-obrien.net/). Although the PowerShell runtime in Azure Functions comes with a lot of Azure PowerShell modules by default (refer to David’s post here for details), these modules are out-dated, and some times,
Continue readingPowerShell Function to Get Azure AD Token
When making Azure Resource Manager REST API calls, you will firstly need to obtain an Azure AD authorization token and use it to construct the authorization header for your HTTP requests. My good friend Stanislav Zhelyazkov (@StanZhelyazkov) has written a PowerShell function call Get-AADToken as part of the OMSSearch PowerShell module for this purpose. You can find it in the OMSSearch project’s GitHub repo: https://github.com/slavizh/OMSSearch/blob/master/OMSSearch.psm1 I have been using this functions in many projects in the past and it served me well. However, the limitation for Stan’s function is that it only works with user principals – you can only generate
Continue readingDeploying Azure Policy Definitions via Azure DevOps (Part 2)
This is the 2nd installment of the 3-part blog series. You can find the other parts here: Part 1: Custom deployment scripts for policy and initiative definitions Part 2: Pester-test policy and initiative definitions in the build pipeline Part 3: Configuring build (CI) and release (CD) pipelines in Azure DevOps In this part, I will walk through the PowerShell module I have developed to pester-test policy and initiative definitions. My intention is to uses these tests to perform syntax validation in the build pipeline, ensure all the definition files are valid before being deployed in the release pipelines. You can
Continue readingDeploying Azure Policy Definitions via Azure DevOps (Part 1)
Introduction Recently I needed to deploy a large number of Azure policy and initiative definitions at customer’s environments using Azure DevOps. These definitions needed to be deployed to different environments (different Management Group hierarchies in different Azure AD Tenants). I faced some difficulties when working on this solution, due to the following limitations: 1. Currently templates do not support Management Groups So I can’t use ARM templates in this case. But, I still needed to develop a solution no matter where should the definitions being deployed (either to a management group or a subscription). 2. Limitations in Azure PowerShell cmdlet
Continue readingPester Test Your ARM Template in Azure DevOps CI Pipelines
Introduction It is fair to say, I have spent a lot of time on Pester lately. I just finished up a 12 months engagement with a financial institute here in Melbourne. During this engagement, everyone in the project team had to write tests for any patterns / pipelines they are developing. I once even wrote a standalone pipeline only to perform Pester tests. One of the scenario we had to cater for is: How can you ensure the ARM template you are deploying only deploys the resources that you intended to deploy? In another word, if someone has gone rogue
Continue readingUsing ARM Templates to Deploying Azure Policy Definitions That Requires Input Parameters
Recently, Kristian Nese from Microsoft published a sample subscription level ARM template that deploys Azure Policy definition and assignment on his GitHub repo. For me, this is good timing since I was just about to start a piece of work designing a collection of custom policy definitions. My end goal is deploying the custom definitions and assignments to multiple environment using VSTS CI/CD pipelines. After spending few days on this task, I finally got it working. During this process, I faced several challenges: At the time of writing, AzureRM PowerShell module and VSTS ARM deployment task has not been updated
Continue reading