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 …

Background

I have posted in the past on how we manage Azure DevOps Pipeline Agents with Packer and Lability. Whilst deploying a new agent I hit a interesting problem, the issue was completely a ‘UTS’ (user too stupid) error, but the way it was surfaced was I think interesting.

The Problem

My script built …

Background

My post-op chemotherapy treatment for my adrenal cancer meant I was struggling to get any fitness, so in 2019 I bought a Ribble CGR-ALe ebike based around the Mahle X35 system. It was in fact pre-ordered prior to the bike’s initial release by Ribble.

This bike served me well, getting me out and about …

Background

We have a few non-critical systems running as single instance Docker containers hosted on Azure WebApps. On these systems we have started to see the warning

Your app is configured with Docker Compose, which is set to retire on March 31, 2027. For multi-container support, please update your app to support …

lewiswrites http://lewispen.github.io/posts/fabric-notebook-service/ -

Fabric Notebook Service

In Fabric, you can write Python using Notebooks in pipelines to retrieve data from external systems where they may be too complex or not supported by any of the available connectors in a dataflow. For example, you can use a …

The Problem

I recently had a customer who’s Azure DevOps Pipelines BizTalk 2020 build had suddenly started to fail. They said they had not altered their BizTalk solution, or their build process.

The Analysis

Turns out the issue was that the operating system on the VM that hosts their self-hosted Azure DevOps …

The Problem

Today I was upgrading our self hosted Delinea Secret Server from 11.9.x to 12.0.x. These upgrades are usually an easy process, all achieved within the Secret Server web UI, but not today.

The upgrade proceeded as normal, downloading the new package, updating the DB schema and updating the binaries, but then …

The Problem

I have been using Packer to generate our Azure DevOps Build agent disk images for a while now. The advantage of this process is that our Azure DevOps self-hosted agents have the same installed software, and hence capabilities, as the Microsoft hosted ones. So it is trival to move a build pipeline from …