Showing posts with label container. Show all posts
Showing posts with label container. Show all posts

Reading Notes #644

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This post gathers my recent reading notes on artificial intelligence, programming, and a few inspiring podcasts. It includes links to articles, tutorials, and fascinating discussions. Whether you're interested in the latest AI developments, .NET tools, or modern architectures, there's plenty here to spark your curiosity. 


Happy reading!

AI


Programming


Podcasts

Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

If you have interesting content, share it!

~Frank

Migrating AzUrlShortener from Azure Static WebApp to Azure Container Apps

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It's been already 2 years since I stopped working on the AzUrlShortener project. Not that I didn't like it, but I was busy with other projects. Recently, the opportunity to work on it again came up, and I jumped on it. So many things changed in two years, and I was excited to see how I could improve the solution's developer experience and modernize the user interface and architecture.

This post is the first of a series where I share a few interesting details, tips, and tricks I learned while working on this project.


AzUrlShortener is an Open source project that consists of a simple URL shortener. The goal was simple: having a budget-friendly solution to share short URLs that would be secure, easy to use, and where the data would stay ours. Each instance is hosted in Azure and used to consist of an API (Azure Function), a Blazor WebAssembly website (Azure Static Web App), and Data Storage (Azure Storage table).

 

Key Changes at a Glance

  • Migration from Azure Static Web Apps to Azure Container Apps
  • Upgrade to .NET 9.0 and integration with .NET Aspire
  • Enhanced security with separated API responsibilities
  • Simplified deployment using Azure Developer CLI (azd)
  • Modern UI with FluentUI Blazor

Upgrading SDKs and packages

As mentioned earlier, a lot changed in two years. The first thing I did was to upgrade the SDKs to .NET 9.0. That was a breeze; I changed the target framework in the project file then used dotnet-updated to list all the packages that needed to be updated. I then used dotnet outdated -u to update all the packages.

And while we were at it, since I started using .NET Aspire, I couldn't resist using it as much as possible. It simplifies the development cycle so much, and the code is much cleaner. So I added that to the mix. It added two more projects to the solution, but now the entire solution is defined in C# in the AppHost project (the Aspire orchestrator).

So now the solution looks like this:

src/
├── Cloud5mins.ShortenerTools.Api               # Internal management API
├── Cloud5mins.ShortenerTools.AppHost           # .NET Aspire orchestrator
├── Cloud5mins.ShortenerTools.Core              # Shared business logic
├── Cloud5mins.ShortenerTools.FunctionsLight    # Public redirect API
├── Cloud5mins.ShortenerTools.ServiceDefaults   # Common service configurations
└── Cloud5mins.ShortenerTools.TinyBlazorAdmin   # Frontend application


Changes to Improve Security

Security should come first, and I wanted to make sure that the solution was as secure as possible. I decided to split the API into two parts. The first part is the API that redirects the users, and it can only do that. The second part is the internal API to manage all the URLs and other data.

I decided to migrate the solution to use Azure Container Apps and have it running in two containers: the TinyBlazorAdmin and the Api. With Azure Container Apps, I can use Microsoft Entra, without any line of code, to secure TinyBlazorAdmin. The API will only be accessible from the TinyBlazorAdmin and won't be exposed to the Internet. As a bonus, since TinyBlazorAdmin and the API are now running inside containers, you could also decide to run them locally.

The storage access got also a security upgrade. Instead of using a connection string, I will be using a Managed Identity to access the Azure Storage Table. This is a much more secure way to access Azure resources, and thanks to .NET Aspire, it is also very easy to implement.


Architecture

The architecture is changing a little. The API is now split in two: FunctionsLight and API. The two APIs use services from Core to avoid code duplication. The TinyBlazorAdmin runs in a container and is secured by Microsoft Entra. API is also running in a container and is not exposed to the Internet. And Azure Storage Table is still our faithful data source.


Previous Architecture

  • Azure Function (API)
  • Azure Storage (Function Code)
  • Azure Static Web App (Blazor WebAssembly)
  • Azure Storage Table (Data)
  • Application Insights


New Architecture

  • Container registry (Docker images)
  • Container Apps Environment
    • Container App/ Function: FunctionsLight Public redirect-only API
    • Container App: Internal API Protected management interface
    • Container App: TinyBlazorAdmin Secured Blazor website
  • Azure Storage Table (Data)
  • Managed Identity
  • Log Analytics


AzUrlShortener Global Diagram

Deployment

The Deployment is also changing. Instead of using a button from my GitHub repo, we will be using the Azure Developer CLI (azd) or a GitHub Action from your own repo (aka fork). The deployment will take ~10 minutes and will be done with one simple command azd up. The entire solution will still have Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Bicep, instead of ARM.

Here a video about it




Were there any challenges?

While working, there were a few challenges or "detours" that slowed the progress of the migration a little, but most of them were due to decisions made to improve the solution. Let's take a look at the first one in the next post: How to use Azure Storage Table with .NET Aspire and a Minimal API (soon).



Reading Notes #638

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Welcome to Reading Notes —a curated dive into the latest and greatest in programming, cloud, and AI. From mastering multithreading with Azure to exploring GitHub Copilot's productivity potential, this collection is brimming with knowledge. Let's unravel what's new, innovative, and worth your attention!


Cloud


Programming

AI

Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

If you have interesting content, share it! 

~frank


Reading Notes #630

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This week, ReadingNotes shares some insightful blog posts that caught my attention. From embracing a positive mindset and integrating local AI models with .NET Aspire, to leveraging Docker for cloud-native development and exploring AI-powered Blazor Kanban, there's plenty to dive into. Happy reading!

Programming

AI

LowCode

Miscellaneous

Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

If you have interesting content, share 

~Frank


Reading Notes #622

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Welcome to this week’s reading notes! In this post, you’ll find a curated selection of insightful articles and tutorials covering various topics in technology and programming. Whether you’re looking to enhance your testing skills with .NET Aspire, improve your code comprehension with GitHub Copilot, or explore the world of Docker for DevOps, there’s something here for everyone. Dive in and enjoy these valuable resources!

If you have interesting content, share it!

Suggestion of the week

Cloud

Programming

LowCode

Miscellaneous

  • Hosting a (DevOpsDays) Tech Conference (Dewan Ahmed) - I went to this even and you could feel it was prepared with patio and care. It very interesting to learn about the behind the scene and all the work put both before and after.DevOpsDay Halifax you won my heart.

~ Frank



Reading Notes #620

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It's Reading Notes time and this week we learn how to improve our experience and security while using AI and containers
 a zip line spider?

Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

Cloud

AI

Programming

~Frank

Reading Notes #614

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In this edition of Reading Notes, we delve into a diverse range of programming topics, from stream manipulation in C# to the latest updates in Docker Desktop. Whether you’re interested in adding AI to your .NET apps or understanding the implications of .NET 6 reaching end-of-support, we’ve got you covered. 


Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

Programming

Miscellaneous

~ Frank


Reading Notes #613

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Good Monday! This week Reading Notes are more listening notes 😅 and we go from .NET Aspire and  containers, passing by communication with AI to camping!

Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

Cloud

Programming

Podcasts

~Frank

Reading Notes #612

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In this week’s Reading Notes, we explore cloud debugging, .NET Aspire, and more. Join us for insights, workshops, and podcasts covering a range of exciting topics! 🚀
 
Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.


 

Cloud

  • GalaSoft Laurent Bugnion (Laurent Bugnion) - Nice post debugging investigating a bug, that cannot be reproduce locally only in the cloud.... But with the right tools it's much easier.

Programming

Podcasts

Miscellaneous

  • What is platform engineering? (Julia Kulla-Mader, Chuck Lantz) - Platform engineering is gaining in popularity, but what ibis really. This article gives a good explanation to start our learning journey.

Reading Notes #611

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Reading Notes! In this roundup, we explore a variety of topics across cloud, programming, databases, and AI. From understanding Docker’s USER instruction to styling Blazor components with CSS, I’ve got you covered. Let’s dive in!


Suggestion of the week

  • Understanding the Docker USER Instruction (Jay Schmidt) - A great post to that explains really clearly the basic usage of user when building our container. After reading this post you should feel confident to follow this best practices.

Cloud

Programming

Databases

AI

~frank

Reading Notes #609

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It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

You also read something you liked? Share it!

   

Cloud

Programming

AI

~frank

Reading Notes #608

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It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 


You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

Programming

AI

Podcast

Miscellaneous


~ Frank


Reading Notes #606

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It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

Azure Developer CLI (azd) – Build 2024 Recap (Grace Kulin) - All developers should look at how it can really speedup and simplify your Azure deployment and ease the creation of your infrastructure as code file (bicep and terraform).

Programming

Catch Up on Microsoft Build 2024: Essential Sessions for .NET Developers (James Montemagno) - Perfect for . NET developers who would like to know what's new and what's coming

Avoiding interactivity with Blazor? (Jon Hilton) - Nice post that examines how some fancy checkbox or button interactivity works in Blazor.

Must-have resources for new .NET Aspire developers (Anthony Simmon) - This post contains a list of other posts and videos about aspired really interesting if you want to get started.

Microsoft Dev Box introduces new ready-to-code and enterprise management capabilities - Wonderful powerful device where and when you need it. This post shares the most recent new features.

Developing cloud-native apps with .NET Aspire and Visual Studio (Mark Downie) - Nice post that celebrates the general availability of .NET Aspire and shares many advantages of using it with Visual Studio.

It turns out, it's not difficult to remove all passwords from our Docker Compose files (Frank Boucher) - We all did it. Hardcoding password in code, because it's "just" a quick thing, or it's just for us, and we think it's okay... but is it? This post shares my learning while removing passwords from docker-compose file.

AI

Announcing the AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code (John Lam) - Nice! The favorite editor of so many now have an AI extension! I missed the Microsoft Build sessions with the demos. Lucky me they are available on demand!


~frank



It turns out, it's not difficult to remove all passwords from our Docker Compose files

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I used to hardcode my password in my demos and code samples. I know it's not a good practice, but it's just for demo purposes, it cannot be that dramatic, right? I know there are proper ways to manage sensitive information, but this is only temporary! And it must be complicated to remove all the passwords from a deployment... It turns out, IT IS NOT difficult at all, and that will prevent serious threats.

In this post, I will share how to remove all passwords from a docker-compose file using environment variables. It's quick to setup and easy to remember. For production deployment, it's better to use secrets, because environment variables will be visible in logs. That said, for demos and debugging and testing, it's nice to see those values. The code will be available on GitHub. This deployment was used for my talks during Azure Developers .NET Days: Auto-Generate and Host Data API Builder on Azure Static Web Apps and The most minimal API code of all... none

The Before Picture

For this deployment, I used a docker-compose file to deploy an SQL Server in a first container and Data API Builder (DAB) in a second one. When the database container starts, I run a script to create the database tables and populate them.

services:

  dab:
    image: "mcr.microsoft.com/azure-databases/data-api-builder:latest"
    container_name: trekapi
    restart: on-failure
    volumes:
      - "./startrek.json:/App/dab-config.json"
    ports:
      - "5000:5000"
    depends_on:
      - sqlDatabase

  sqlDatabase:
    image: mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server
    container_name: trekdb
    hostname: sqltrek
    environment:
      ACCEPT_EULA: "Y"
      MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD: "1rootP@ssword"
    ports:
      - "1433:1433"
    volumes:
      - ./startrek.sql:/startrek.sql
    entrypoint:
      - /bin/bash
      - -c
      - |
        /opt/mssql/bin/sqlservr & sleep 30
        /opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd -U sa -P "1rootP@ssword" -d master -i /startrek.sql
        sleep infinity

As we can see, the password is in clear text twice, in the configuration of the database container and in the parameter for sqlcmd when populating the database. Same thing for the DAB configuration file. Here the data-source node where the password is in clear text in the connection string.

"data-source": {
 	"database-type": "mssql",
	"connection-string": "Server=localhost;Database=trek;User ID=sa;Password=myPassword!;",
	"options": {
		"set-session-context": false
	}
}

First Pass: Environment Variables

The easiest password instance to remove was in the sqlcmd command. When defining the container, an environment variable was used... Why not use it! To refer to an environment variable in a docker-compose file, you use the syntax $$VAR_NAME. I used the name of the environment variable MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD to replace the hardcoded password.

/opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd -U sa -P $$MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD -d master -i /startrek.sql

Second Pass: .env File

That's great but the value is still hardcoded when we assign the environment variable. Here comes the environment file. They are text files that holds the values in key-value paired style. The file is not committed to the repository, and it's used to store sensitive information. The file is read by the docker-compose and the values are injected. Here is the final docker-compose file:

services:

  dab:
    image: "mcr.microsoft.com/azure-databases/data-api-builder:latest"
    container_name: trekapi
    restart: on-failure
    env_file:
      - .env
    environment:
      MY_CONN_STRING: "Server=host.docker.internal;Initial Catalog=trek;User ID=sa;Password=${SA_PWD};TrustServerCertificate=True"
    volumes:
      - "./startrek.json:/App/dab-config.json"
    ports:
      - "5000:5000"
    depends_on:
      - sqlDatabase

  sqlDatabase:
    image: mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server
    container_name: trekdb
    hostname: sqltrek
    environment:
      ACCEPT_EULA: "Y"
      MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD: ${SA_PWD}
    env_file:
      - .env
    ports:
      - "1433:1433"
    volumes:
      - ./startrek.sql:/startrek.sql
    entrypoint:
      - /bin/bash
      - -c
      - |
        /opt/mssql/bin/sqlservr & sleep 30
        /opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd -U sa -P $$MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD -d master -i /startrek.sql
        sleep infinity

Note the env_file directive in the services definition. The file .env is the name of the file used. The ${SA_PWD} tells docker compose to look for SA_PWD in the .env file. Here is what the file looks like:

SA_PWD=This!s@very$trongP@ssw0rd

Conclusion

Simple and quick. There are no reasons to still have the password in clear text in the docker compose files anymore. Even for a quick demo! Of course for a production deployment there are stronger ways to manage sensitive information, but for a demo it's perfect and it's secure.

During Microsoft Build Keynote on day 2, Julia Liuson and John Lambert talked about how trade actors are not only looking for the big fishes, but also looking at simple demos and old pieces of code, looking for passwords, keys and sensitive information.

Reading Notes #605

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It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

Programming

AI

~Frank

Reading Notes #604

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It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 


You also read something you liked? Share it!

 

Cloud

Programming

DevOps

Miscellaneous

  • Introducing Plans on Microsoft Learn (Kaberi Bell) - Would it be to be a data engineer, AI specialist, app builder there's a plan for you and that's a very cool new feature on learn have a look this blog post explain all of it

  • How Do You Measure Developer Experience? (Jennifer Riggins) - An interesting article about what and how measure performance. I didn't know so many system and details concepts were that detailed.

  • Windows Terminal Preview 1.21 Release (Christopher Nguyen) - Tons of new features again and I love| seeing all those community contributions.

~Frank

Reading Notes #603

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It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

Having interesting content? Share it!

Cloud

Programming

Podcasts

Miscellaneous

  • DevOps Adoption for IT Managers (Chris Pietschmann) - Interesting post that shares the benefits of DevOps for your enterprise and how to approach it as a manager.

  • Cascadia Code 2404.23 (Christopher Nguyen) - I used to do ASCII art back on my C=64... Now that all those new fonts and symbols are added should I start again? Nice to have all the options available to be able to display everything we need|the console.

~Frank

Reading Notes #600

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It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

Having interesting content? Share it! 

a sign with 600 written in the middle of books
by: Microsoft Designer

Suggestion of the week


Cloud


Programming

Miscellaneous

~Frank

Reading Notes #597

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It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Suggestion of the week

Cloud

Programming

Open Source

Miscellaneous

~frank

Reading Notes #595

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It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

 
If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Programming

AI

Databases

Miscellaneous

~Frank

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