Web development is arguably the most popular area of software development right now. Software developers can make snappy, eye-catching websites, and build robust APIs. I’ve recently developed a specific interest in a less discussed facet of web development: web scraping. Web scraping is the process of programmatically analyzing a website’s Document Object Model (DOM) to extract specific data of interest. Web scraping is a powerful tool for automating certain features such as filling out a form, submitting data, etc. Some […]
Bridging the gap between serverless OLTP and Analytics Cosmos DB is unabashedly a document-based Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) system. It was engineered at its core to provide low latency, high throughput transactions with service level agreements (SLAs), consistency models, and guarantees to back it. It does this exceptionally well, but there are trade-offs for these architectural decisions. Other databases can do like complex queries with joins and aggregates or set-based operations. Cosmos DB, by design, doesn’t have a native solution […]
Have you been in a situation where an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template with Azure Blueprint is the only option available for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) deployment? Have you realized that certain operations during deployment are not possible with an ARM template? Have you been in a situation that PowerShell or Azure CLI can get the job done, but there is no way to inject that script into the ARM template? Maybe you have felt like ARM-disabled at this time. […]
This blog is part of a series of hands-on labs on leveraging the Power Platform and Microsoft Azure. To break this series up into more manageable chunks, in this installment, we’ll focus on setting up the On-Premises Gateway that will connect to our local SQL Server and the Azure Logic App that will use the new gateway to connect to our local SQL Server 2017 and return customer data using an HTTP request and response. We’ll wrap it up by […]
Leveraging the Power Platform and Microsoft Azure to connect housing agencies and intermediaries with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Intro The US Department of Housing and Urban Development runs a program known as the Housing Counseling Program that aids housing agencies around the nation through things like grants and training. These agencies provide tremendous benefit to Americans in many forms including credit counseling, foreclosure prevention, predatory lending awareness, homelessness, and more. One of the requirements for approval […]
This is the second of two blog posts that will share solutions to common Azure DevOps Services concerns: In “Azure DevOps Services for Government: Access Control”, I covered common access control concerns. In “Azure DevOps Services for Government: Information Storage” (this post), I will address common concerns with storing information in the commercial data centers that host Azure DevOps Services. Storing Service Connection Credentials To deploy Azure infrastructure from an Azure DevOps pipeline, your pipeline agent needs permission to create […]
Relational database source control, versioning, and deployments have notoriously been challenging. Each instance of the database (Dev, Test, Production) can contain different data, may be upgraded at different times, and are generally not in a consistent state. This is known as database drift. Traditional Approach and Challenges Traditionally, to move changes between each instance, a one-off “state-based” comparison is done either directly between the database or against a common state like a SQL Server Data Tools project. This yields a […]
In my previous post, I discussed lessons learned about migrating SQL Server databases from on-premise to Azure SQL Databases. This post will share several of my issues and solutions around automating Azure resource provisioning and application code deployment. Before this project, I had never used Azure DevOps or Team Foundation Server for anything except a code repository or task tracking. Most of these applications would use Build and Release pipelines to configure the Azure subscription and deploy the applications. Besides, […]
In this blog post, I would like to introduce and explain Azure’s new service offering for Application Gateway Ingress Controller (AGIC) for Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). AKS is gaining momentum within the enterprise and Microsoft has been refining the offering to drive adoption. This feature piques my interest because of its capability to improve latency and allow for better application performance within AKS Clusters. I will first discuss the basics of the application gateway Ingress controller. Then, I will dive […]
Azure DevOps provides a suite of tools that your development team needs to plan, create, and ship products. It comes in two flavors: Azure DevOps Services – the SaaS option hosted by Microsoft. Azure DevOps Server – the IaaS option hosted by you. When comparing the two to decide which option enables your team to deliver the most value in the least amount of time, Azure DevOps Services is the clear winner, but velocity alone is not the only consideration […]