Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (James Clear) - An excellent book that is very pleasant to read. I really appreciated the way things are broken in tiny pieces. I don't think this book re-invented the molecular physic, but by cutting, dissecting our habits that way it's hard to think that you can fail. It's easier to get started right now; even starting new habits before finishing the book!
Top 15 Visual Studio Code Extensions in 2019 (Gift Egwuenu) - Nice list of extension that targets primarily JavaScript developers but there's definitely a few gems for all of us.
Podcast
Anthos Migrate, with Issy Ben-Shaul (Kubernetes Podcast from Google) - Nice update. I like the talk about Anthos it look like a great migration tool. I need to find that GitHub repo...
Azure Functions using Node with Simona Cotin (.NET Rocks!) - Great show. I just switch my website following that Jam stack pattern. I was planning to use Azure Functions to add a few little twists.... I'm happy to see that I not alone thinking like that!
0230 - Alain Vezina - Le métier du DevOps (Visual Studio Talk Show) - Super épisode, très intéressant d'entendre parler du rôle de DevOps de quelqu'un qui le vie au quotidien. Merci de la suggestion, je crois, bien que je suis du pour relire The Pheonix Project.
Goal Setting Tips & Tracking KPIs (Video Pursuit Podcast) - Really interesting episode. Everybody is talking about matrix and KPI... But it's not frequent to hear about the "how". I really like how the goals are explained, achievable, but not easy... And how we should react when we don't reach them.
Avoiding Azure Functions Cold Starts (Mark Heath) - Does cold starts are affecting your solutions? Maybe not, but if they are this post lists three scenarios to reduce them as must as possible.
A really interesting book that helps to focus and keep in mind the most important. I didn't read it with a purpose of business really, but it did make me remember past experiences and it was easy to make the relationship between success and when the story was clear. Take the time to read it, do the exercises/ reflections required... it's worth it.
How Azure Resource Graph is gonna change the way you search and script (Stephane Lapointe) - Whaat?! 15x faster! If you are not using Azure graph yet... This post is for you. If you do use graph, still read that you may learn a few tricks. In short, it's a mandatory read for anyone using Azure.
Cloud
Azure Blueprints: ISO27001 Shared Services (Eric Leonard) - This excellent second post of a series goes dipper and shares details about one specific blueprint template. And explains some pitfall to avoid.
Azure Blueprints: Intro (Eric Leonard) - If you don't know Blueprint this post is an excellent first contact.
Was MongoDB Ever the Right Choice? (Justin Etheredge) - Nice post that put in perspective what's NoSql and why MondoDB could or not be a good solution for our project.
Static websites are lightning fast, and running them inside an Azure Blob Storage instead of a WebApp is incredibly economical (less than $1/ month). Does it mean you need to do everything manually? Absolutely not! In a previous post I explained how to automatically generated your static website using a Build Pipeline inside Azure DevOps. In this post, let's complete the CI-CD by creating a Release Pipeline to deploy it.
The Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Template
First thing first. If we want our release pipeline to deploy our website in Azure, we need first to be sure our Resources are available "up there." The best way to do this is by using an Azure Resource Manager (ARM template). I will use the same project started in the previous post, feel free to adapt to your structure or copy it from it.
Create a new file named deploy.json in the deployment folder. We need a simple storage account.
I used a parameter (StorageName) to define the name of the storage account. This way I could have multiple pipelines deploying in different storages.
Not to make the ARM template accessible to the release pipeline we also need to publish it. The easiest way to do it is to add another Copyfile task in our azure-pipeline. Add this task just before the PublishBuildArtifacts.
Once you commit and push these changes, it will trigger a build. When done, the ARM template will be available, and we will be able to start working on the release pipeline.
The Release Pipeline
Navigate to the DevOps project created in the previous post. This time, create a new Release Pipeline. When asked, select an empty template, we will pick manually the tasks we need.
First, we need to define the trigger and where are our artifacts. Click on the thing at the left of the screen. Select the build projects and let's use the latest version of the artifact to our deployment.
To get a continuous deployment, you need to enable it by clicking on the lightning bolt and selecting the enabled button.
Now let's select our tasks. Click on the "+" sign to add new tasks. We need three of these: Azure Resource Group Deployment, Azure CLI, and Azure File Copy.
Task 1 - Azure Resource Group Deployment
The first one will be an Azure Resource Group Deployment. The will be used to deploy our ARM template and be sure that the resources are available in Azure.
To configure the ARM deployment we need to select the Azure subscription and authorize the pipeline to have access. Then you will need to specify the name of the resource group you will be deploying into; it's location and finally points where is the linked ARM template.
Task 2 - Azure CLI
The second one is an Azure CLI. As I am writing this post, it's not possible to enable the static website property of a storage account. Therefore we will execute an Azure CLI command to change that configuration. Once you picked the Azure subscription, select inline script and enter this Azure CLI command:
az storage blob service-properties update --account-name wyamfrankdemo --static-website --index-document index.html
This will enable the static website property of the storage account named wyamfrankdemo, and set the default document to index.html.
Task 3 - Azure File Copy
The last task is an Azure File Copy to copy all our files from $(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/drop/drop/outpout to the $web container (in our Azure Blob storage). The container must be named $web, that's the name used by Azure for the static website.
Wrapping up
Once you are done configuring the Release Pipeline, it's time to save it and run it. After only a minute or two (this demo is pretty small) the blog should be available into Azure. To find your endpoint (aka URL) you can go into the portal.azure.com and look at the static website property of the blob storage that we just create.
I have that little website, a blog that doesn't consume much bandwidth, and I was looking to optimize it. Since Azure blob storage is such a low expensive resource, I thought it would be the perfect fit. I could use a static website generator to transform my markdown file into a nice looking blog and publish that in Azure! Using Azure DevOps pipeline I could at every "git push)" do that all automatically without having anything installed on my machine... meaning I could write a new blog post from anywhere and still be able to update my blog.
In this post, I will explain all the steps required to create a continuous integration and continuous deployment process to deploy a static website into Azure.
The Goal
The idea here is to have on a local machine a folder tracked by git. At every push, we want that change to trigger our CI-CD process. The Build Pipeline will generates the static website. The Release Pipeline will create our Azure resources and publish those artifacts.
The Static Website
In this post, I'm using Wyam.io as static website generator. However, it doesn't matter. There is a ton of excellent generator available: Jekyll, Hugo, Hexo, etc. I selected Wyam because it is written in .Net and If eventually, I want to dig dipper it would be easier for me.
For all those generated websites, it the same pattern. You have an input folder where you have all your posts and images and an output folder that contains the generated result. You don't need to track the content of your output folder, so it would be a good practice to modify the .gitignore file accordingly. As an example here how look mine.
The build pipeline will generate our website for us. There so, it needs to have the generator installed. A great tool to do this kind of tasks is Cake. What I like with that tool is that it is cross platform so I can use it without worrying on wish OS it will run.rd.
The Azure pipeline is defined in an azure-pipeline.yml file. Installing Cake should definitely be in our first steps. To know how to do that, navigate to the Get started page of the Cake's website, it's explained that we need to execute a build.ps1 or build.sh (depending on your build setup). That will install Cake and execute the file build.cake. Those files can be found on the GitHub repository as mentioned on the website.
On the Wyam website, in the deployment section of the documentation, you will find a sample for our required build.cake file. It looks like this:
On the first line, it will install the required NuGet package (you should definitely specify the version). Then it defines some tasks, and run the generation command. Create that file at the root of the website folder.
Now let's have a look at the azure-pipeline.yml file.
The first line is to specify the pipeline trigger. In our case, we will look at the master branch. Then I declare a variable to keep the .Net Core version. That way, it will be easier to maintain the script in the future.
The pool command is to specify what kind of server is created. Here I'm using a Windows one, yet I could have used Linux too (all components are cross-platform).
Then comes the list of steps. The first one install .Net Core. The second step is a powershell command to execute our build.ps1 file. At this stage, the static website should be generated in a subfolder output. The last two steps are to copy the content of the output folder into the ArtifactStagingDirectory and then publish it. This way the Release Pipeline can access the artifacts.
There is detailed information about all the commands for a YAML Azure Pipeline file in the documentation. Create your own or copy-paste this one in a new azure-pipeline.yml file under a subfolder named deployment. Once your file is created, commit and push them to GitHub or any repository.
Navigate to Azure DevOps (dev.azure.com). Open your project, or create a new one. Now from the left menu click on the Pipeline (the rocket icon), to create a new one. If you are using an external repository, like me, you will need to authorize Azure DevOps to your repo.
To configure the pipeline, since we already have created the azure-pipeline.yml file, select the Existing Azure Pipeline YAML file option and point it to our file in the deployment folder.
It will open our YAML file. If you wish you could update it. Run it, by clicking to Run blue button in the top-right corner. Your build pipeline is done. Now every time you will push changes into your repository that build will get triggered and generate the static website.
First steps with Docker and Kubernetes - Introduction (Matteo Pagani) - Wow, fantastic post to get started with Kubernetes the author mention that after reading this you won't be an expert... However, you will definitely know enough to be dangerous.
I published a video that explains how to UnZip files without any code by using Logic Apps. However, that solution didn't work for bigger files or different archive type. This post is to explain how you can use the Azure Function to cover those situations. This first iteration supports "Zip" files; all the code is available in my GitHub.
Prerequisites
To create the Azure Function, I will use the excellent Azure Function extension of Visual Studio Code. You don't "need" it. However, it makes thing very easy.
You can easily install the extension from Inside Visual Studio Code by clicking on the extension button in the left menu. You will also need to install the Azure Function Core Tools
Creating the Function
Once the extension installed, you will find a new button in the left menu. That opens a new section with four new option: Create New Project, Create Function, Deploy to Function App, and Refresh.
Click on the first option Create New Project. Select a local folder and a language; for this demo, I will use C#. This will create a few files and folder. Now let's create our Function. From the extension menu, select the second option Create Function. Create a Blob Trigger named UnzipThis into the folder we just created, and select (or create) Resource Group, Storage Account, and location in your subscription. After a few seconds, another question will pop asking the name of the container that our blob trigger monitors. For this demo, input-files is used.
Once the function is created you will see this warning message.
What that means is that to be able to debug locally we will need to set the setting AzureWebJobsStorage to UseDevelopmentStorage=true in the local.settings.json file. It will look like this.
The binding is attached to the container named input-files, from the storage account reachable by the connection "cloud5mins_storage". The real connectionString is in the local.settings.json file.
Now, let's put the code we need for our demo:
[FunctionName("Unzipthis")]
public static async Task Run([BlobTrigger("input-files/{name}", Connection = "cloud5mins_storage")]CloudBlockBlob myBlob, string name, ILogger log)
{
log.LogInformation($"C# Blob trigger function Processed blob\n Name:{name}");
string destinationStorage = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("destinationStorage");
string destinationContainer = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("destinationContainer");
try{
if(name.Split('.').Last().ToLower() == "zip"){
CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(destinationStorage);
CloudBlobClient blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient();
CloudBlobContainer container = blobClient.GetContainerReference(destinationContainer);
using(MemoryStream blobMemStream = new MemoryStream()){
await myBlob.DownloadToStreamAsync(blobMemStream);
using(ZipArchive archive = new ZipArchive(blobMemStream))
{
foreach (ZipArchiveEntry entry in archive.Entries)
{
log.LogInformation($"Now processing {entry.FullName}");
//Replace all NO digits, letters, or "-" by a "-" Azure storage is specific on valid characters
string valideName = Regex.Replace(entry.Name,@"[^a-zA-Z0-9\-]","-").ToLower();
CloudBlockBlob blockBlob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(valideName);
using (var fileStream = entry.Open())
{
await blockBlob.UploadFromStreamAsync(fileStream);
}
}
}
}
}
}
catch(Exception ex){
log.LogInformation($"Error! Something went wrong: {ex.Message}");
}
}
UPDATED: Thanks to Stefano Tedeschi who found a bug and suggested a fix.
The source of our compressed file is defined in the trigger. To define the destination destinationStorage and destinationContainer are used. Their value are saved into local.settings.json. Then because this function only supports .zip file a little validation was required.
Next, we create an archive instance using the new System.IO.Compression library. We then create references to the storage account, blob, and container. It not possible to used second binding here because for one archive file you have a variable number of potential extracted files. The bindings are static; therefore we need to use the regular storage API.
Then for every file (aka entry) in the archive the code upload it to the destination storage.
Deploying
To deploy the function, from the Azure Function extension click on the third option: Deploy to Function App. Select your subscription and Function App name.
Now we need to configure our settings in Azure. By default, the local.setting are NOT used. Once again the extension is handy.
Under the subscription expand the freshly deployed Function App AzUnzipEverything, and right-click on Application Settings. Use Add New Setting to create cloud5mins_storage, destinationStorage and destinationContainer.
The function is now deployed and the settings are set, now we only need to create the blob storage containers, and we will be able to test the function. You can easily do that directly from the Azure portal (portal.azure.com).
You are now ready to upload a file into the input-files container.
Let's Code Together
This first iteration only supports "Zip" files. All the code is available on GitHub. Feel free to use it. If you would like to see or add support for other archive types join me on GitHub!.
In a video, please!
I also have a video of this post if you prefer.
I also have an extended version where I introduce more the Visual Studio Extension to work with Azure Function. And explain more details about the Azure Function V2.
Migrating Azure Functions from v1 (.NET) to v2 (Jeremy Likness) - A great story and an migration walkthrough. It's most likely that by following these steps we can only be successful with our migration.
Applied AI in Software Development (Afsana Atar) - This post is an excellent overview of whats AI at ten thousand feet in the air. Perfect if you are not a data scientist and would like to learn more about that trend.
My Twitch Live Coding Setup (Suz Hinton) - A great post from Suz (aka Noopkat) a long time technical streamer, who his both very smart and generous. Definitely, a post to read.
Sixty-five videos and one year later
One year already that I start sharing videos on YouTube, I've been blogging for many years and wanted to try something new. Creating videos seems like the next logical step. And this is how I decided to start sharing short videos to answer technical questions about Microsoft Azure on YouTube. This post, I will explain what I learned during the first year of my journey.
The Beginning
I started my YouTube channel in French. During the two first months, I published one video by week. I learned a lot through this period, how to prepare my code snippets, my files, and my screen. The biggest takeaway was that: preparation is the key. The more prepared you are, the more efficient you will be in front of the camera. I also discover that compare to writing a blog post; you need to pay more attention, way earlier in the process, to the tiny details.
It may sound like a cliché, but it was challenging to watch myself. But it's the best way to improve. You need to accept those mistakes and promise yourself that next time, you will do better. It's normal and okay not to be perfect.
Let's be bilingual
One thing that I was looking forward was to be able to share my videos with all my clients/ friends/ community members. However, I couldn't because while some are perfectly comfortable in French (and only French), others only understand English. And this is why I decided to record all my videos in both French and English. I knew that would mean doubling the workload, so I adapted my schedule to publish every second week.
Doing all does videos I found my beat, my style, the things I like and dislike. I also spend a lot of time learning the YouTube platform through books and by watching other YouTubers. It's such an incredible resourceful community!
A New Camera
The software (Camtasia from TechSmith) I was using, and that I'm still using today, can record both your screen and your webcam. It keeps all the tracks separated, and this is great because you can change the size and position of the mortise in post-production.
My challenge was that I wanted to record both in 1080P (full HD) because during my intros and conclusion when the webcam input fill the screen I want good image quality. However, the software (or more likely my PC), did not let me record in 1080P (full HD) the screen and the webcam input.
To upgrade the quality of my recordings, I decided to use my DSLR instead of my webcam. Of course, it represents more work in post-production because now I need to synchronize the two videos sources, but now everything is 1080.
The famous algorithm
The more I was studying my statistics and reading comments (thank you all for your constructive comments by the way), I started to understand that having all my videos in French and English on the same channel was not the best idea.
First, for the YouTube algorithm, it was very confusing because it couldn't identify the video's language. Therefore, it's harder to do its job and make recommendations.
Secondly, it didn't cross my mind at the beginning, because I understand both languages, but for a subscriber that understand only one of the language, it's was very confusing and not very pleasing to have all those "others" un-useful videos in the feed.
After a very long (and hard) reflection, I decided to create a second channel and "move" all my French content to that channel. I say "move" but you cannot "move" contents on YouTube, and that was the principal reason why I was hesitating to split my channel. By creating a new channel, and re-uploading my older (aka French) videos I was losing all my stats (views, subscribers), and references.
The effect was immediate on the English channel as the views and subscribers exploded a week after. And on the other side, my brand new French channel didn't really catch-up. Never the less I intend to continue to create French content. ;)
Today's Status
As this post gets published, I have a cumulative total of sixty-five videos online and more than a thousand subscribers. I publish every second week, usually on Thursday, two videos on the same topic one in French on fr.cloud5mins.com and one in English on cloud5mins.com. I have a fantastic community super supportive, asking questions and suggesting topics.
I'm very thankful for all that positive feedback. To help me you can subscribe to my YouTube channel of course, or become one of my Patreon at patreon.com/fboucheros
What's Next
I'm definitely continuing to create videos. I plan to start doing some streaming on Twitch, where I will building cloud solutions.
Rust Governance: Scaling Empathy (Manish Goregaokar) - A friend recently introduced me to Rust. This post assumed we all already familiar to it, and talk about the current problems of this new language and potential solutions.
I was definitely not expecting that, when I picked up this book, but I am happy I did.
This "self-help" book is filled with a ton of comedy and I appreciated it. I felt like my best friend was talking about a serious topic but because he was in a crazy good mood was just having a good time telling me his story. Simple and real. It leaves you with a lot to think about.
Azure Automation of A-to-Z, Part I (dbakevlar) - This is a great post very instructive, that explains how and why we should structure our scripts.
Azure Policies (Gregor Suttie) - One of the best tools to he lp us with the governance in Azure is the policies. This post is a nice introduction to how it could help.
Moving your ASP.NET applications to the Microsoft Cloud (Premier Developer) - If you are thinking to migrate to the cloud, it's important to plan your migration. This post is the perfect point to get started, it contains references to deeper books and documents.
The Rise of Microsoft Visual Studio Code (Lyn Levenick) - Cool statistics about editor usage. Not sure of the real correlation with the editor used and the skill level, but it's still an interesting coincidence.
Stream Deck Tricks for Streamers… and Muggles too! (Jeff) - Fantastic post that explains so much why that little thing can save you so much pain. As THE day when I'm starting to stream get closer and closer... This is gold.
TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking
Author: Chris J. Anderson
Fantastic book that covers a lot of topics related to presenting. It covers the before, during, and even the after very smartly. There are no recipes here and this is exactly what makes this book so great. A must.
Migrating to the New Azure Service Bus SDK (Mark Heath) - This is a nice post to avoid losing t much time trying to migrate. Also if you are not sure, this post explains some benefices in addition to showing some gotchas.
Chocolatey on Windows (Daniel Franciscus) - One thing that I like about Chocolatey, I mean other than the fact that it's awesome, is that it never stops to impress me!
Suggestion of the week
Cloud
