Saman Ahmadi - Blog - Microsoft cloud and ecosystem explained.

AKS Federated Identity Credentials

Posted on 21.12.2022

AKS Federated identity credentials can access Azure resources like Key Vault or Storage account in the Kubernetes Pods without providing account credentials or connection strings in the code. Azure Kubernetes Service, or AKS, is a managed Kubernetes platform service which provides an environment for cloud-native apps. The service interoperates with Azure security, identity, cost management and migration services. The platform usage is famous in micro-service applications, but also a perfect environment for long-running data processes and orchestrations. Regardless of functionality,…

Best practice of using Secrets in Azure DevOps

Posted on 25.04.2022

Best practice of secrets in Azure DevOps and life-cycle management can be a complicated topic. In some cases, existing AzDo tasks might not fulfil your needs. This post reviews the options. The need to use secrets in Azure DevOps pipelines increases the more extensive the enterprise environment, and the more complicated Azure resources are in use. There are three options that I’ll go through in this blog post, and the usage of each case depends on the requirements and the…

Azure Key Vault Secret Updates using Logic App

Posted on 13.09.2021

Azure Key Vault Secret updates using Logic App are challenging as there are no connectors, but using the API is a secure and managed way to do it. Here is some background information on the use case. During my recent data and integration project, the team used Azure Logic apps to batch update and processed data to Salesforce. The Salesforce API requires a pre-defined schema for batch updating its objects. The ETL pipe using Azure Databricks makes the data ready…

Meltlake by Futurice, the founding story

Posted on 18.08.2020

Meltlake by Futurice got founded as a new sister company early this month. I’ll review the founding story in this blog post. Many of friends and colleagues have asked me about the company and the relationship I have with the founded start-up. In this blog post, I’ll explain how everything started and what was my role in the new start-up. Joining The Futurice UK I joined Futurice Group London branch in September 2018. That is after having an eight months…

DataBricks Automation with Azure DevOps

Posted on 01.06.2020

Databricks on Azure is essential in data, AI and IoT solutions, but the env. automation can be challenging. Azure DevOps is a great tool for automation. Using Pipelines and product CLI integrations can minimise or even remove these challenges. My team is currently working on a cutting edge IoT platform where data flows from edge devices to Azure. We are dealing with data which is sensitive, and under GDPR so no one should have direct access to the data platform…

Implement Azure Infra using Terraform and Pipelines

Posted on 25.05.2020

Continuous integration and delivery is part of DevOps processes, and currently part of most software projects. In my previous blog post, I had a review of the problem and why infrastructure as code (IaC) matters. The analysis included the architecture diagram and the Azure components. In this blog post as the continuation, you can read and learn how to Implement Azure Infra using Terraform and Pipelines to be part of your CI/CD in Azure DevOps. This blog post includes a…

Azure Infrastructure using Terraform and Pipelines

Posted on 18.05.2020

The size and complexity of cloud infrastructure have a direct relationship with management, maintainability and cost control of cloud projects. It might be easy to create resources using the Azure Portal or the CLI, but when there is a need to update properties, change plans, upgrade services or re-create all services in new regions the situation is more tricky. The combination of Azure DevOps pipelines and Terraform brings an enterprise-level solution to solve the problem. The Infrastructure Problem My previous…

5 Essential Free Azure Services for SaaS Architecture

Posted on 11.05.2020

The mindset for start-ups is to keep the costs down and develop fast with quality. Therefore the idea is to have continuous improvement loops and publish the most viable product (MVP) version as soon as possible. Microsoft Azure provides services which are essential to the Software as a Service (SaaS) products. Most importantly and fortunately, most of these services have a free plan to kick start the development project. In this blog post, I’ll have a review of these free…

Azure SaaS platform, an output of exam preparations and experiments

Posted on 02.10.2019

The latest Azure certification exams are demanding and need a lot of demos and hands-on training. During the preparations and experiments, an e-commerce Azure Saas Platform was formed unintentionally. Taking Microsoft certification exams has been apart of my professional career since 2007. Certifying myself not only verifies the current level of my knowledge but also makes me study hard for newly available technology. I’m currently on the DevOps journey with the following exams: AZ900 Azure Fundamentals (Done) AZ-103 Azure Administrator…

Azure Functions Hosting Options and Best Practices

Posted on 25.03.2019

The process for creating Azure Functions is straightforward on the Azure Portal. The only confusing option you have to consider during the function creation is which hosting model to choose from the available choices. There are four different hosting plans to choose from, where you will also be able to determine which OS to host your functions. In this blog post, I’ll have a review of different choices and what suits you best. This is what you will see on…

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