The other day I ran into one of those Azure deployment problems that looks reasonable right up until you understand which service is actually making the call.

I had provisioned an Azure Key Vault with enabled_for_template_deployment set to true. I was familiar with this setting from working with Bicep and ARM …

Problem Space

When deploying Azure solutions with Infrastructure as Code, we often create role assignments as part of the deployment. For example, a Bicep deployment may give a Function App’s managed identity access to a Key Vault, storage account, or Service Bus namespace.

It is easy to focus on the role being …

Overview

WEBSITE_CONTENTSHARE is an app setting used by Azure Functions and Logic Apps Standard (which runs on the Functions runtime) alongside WEBSITE_CONTENTAZUREFILECONNECTIONSTRING to identify the Azure Files share the app uses for its content.

The important thing to call out up front: you don’t always need …

Problem Space

Role assignments are one of those areas in Azure that look simple on the surface, but can become awkward pretty quickly once you start automating them properly.

Anyone who has worked with RBAC through IaC for long enough will usually run into the same set of problems.

There are usually three things in …

Over the last few years, Azure Logic Apps Standard has become a core building block for many integration workloads. The platform gives us flexibility, connector richness, and scalable runtime options, but as workflow solutions grow, so does the risk profile.

In many teams, validation still leans heavily on run history …

Problem Space

In most Infrastructure as Code teams, Bicep quality checks start to look mature as soon as linting and deployment validation are in place. In practice, there is still a blind spot: logic-level testing of exported functions, types, and variables.

Most teams validate by deploying to a subscription and …

Problem Space

I recently had to troubleshoot an issue where two App Registrations in the same tenant had the same display name.

Azure allows this. Operationally, it hurts.

When names are duplicated, diagnosis gets slower and riskier because engineers cannot trust what they see first in the portal.

Why It Matters …

⚠️ NOTE

Microsoft guidance is clear that Azure RBAC should be used for data plane authorization moving forward, instead of legacy access policies

• Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) vs. access policies (legacy)
• Provide access to Key Vault keys, certificates, and secrets with Azure role-based access control …

Problem Space

As Bicep adoption grows, so does the complexity of the environments and teams using it. Without clear authoring practices, Bicep codebases can quickly become inconsistent, hard to maintain, and error-prone. In this post I wanted to share some practical authoring practices and anti-patterns to help you and …

Introduction

I have been writing integration tests using MSTest recently and have encountered the need to control the level of parallelism required. MSTest, by default, runs your tests in parallel to maximise performance and reduce overall test execution time. This is great for independent unit tests, but it can …