Developer Support

Advocacy and Innovation

Deploying a Virtual Assistant on the cheap

The thing I was interested in recently was deploying to the smallest and least expensive dev/test instances of the various services in order to keep the cost down. Since this was just for demo purposes and I would be the only one talking to the bot, I didn’t need the capacity and scale of the default install.

Azure Automation DSC via ARM Template

One of the challenges was figuring out a way to get the commercial software installed and configured on the virtual machines in a completely automated fashion, which is where Azure Automation DSC fit into the solution. DSC or Desired State Configuration is not a new concept, but I recently learned that Azure Automation can be used as a DSC pull server that hosts your DSC configurations and resources in a convenient location.

Enterprise Deployment of an Internal Load Balancer with an App Service Environment v2

App Dev Manager Mariusz Kolodziej kicks off this multi-part series covering the deployment of an Internal Load Balancer with an App Services Environment via ARM templates and PowerShell.Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is becoming the norm for deploying all resources (IaaS and PaaS) in the Cloud. This post is part 1 of 7 of a miniseries which will...

Deploying Linked ARM Templates with VSTS

In this post, Premier Developer Consultant Najib Zarrari walks through how to deploy linked ARM templates with Visual Studio Team Services. When dealing with deploying a large number of components in Azure, a single ARM template might be challenging to manage and maintain.  ARM linked templates allow you to make your deployment more ...

[Service Fabric] Auto-scaling your Service Fabric cluster–Part I

In this article from his blog, Premier Developer consultant Larry Wall discusses building an ARM template that configures auto-scaling on a virtual machine scale set (VMSS). Like most people, whenever I need to build an ARM template to do something with Service Fabric, I'm browsing around Github or where ever else I can find the bits ...

Resolving Azure ARM REST API Versions Conflict In ARM Templates

This post is from Premier Developer consultant Adel Ghabboun. Usually if you use the Azure Portal Automation Script feature to generate an ARM template and copy that to a new Visual Studio Azure Resource Group project, Visual Studio editor will complain about the API version that is used in the template and suggest a new version. It ...

VSTS Private Agents with ARM

This post is provided by App Dev Managers, Mariusz Kolodziej and Francis Lacroix who discuss how to automagically deploy a VSTS Private Agent with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and some PowerShell.My customers love to use VSTS to enable their DevOps capabilities, but in some cases they are not able to use the Hosted Agents due to security ...

From ASM to ARM – A real world migration

This post is provided by Senior Application Development Manager, Mark Pazicni, who walks us through an Azure migration exercise to move a legacy deployment in ASM to a modern deployment in ARM. Migrating from Azure Service Management (ASM) to Azure Resource Manager (ARM) can be a daunting task, but hopefully this post will outline some ...