As application developers, it’s our responsibility to ensure that the applications we create are using credentials and other secret configuration values in a secure way. Oftentimes, this task is overlooked in the pursuit of our primary concern: building new features and delivering business value quickly. In some cases, this translates into developers tolerating flat-out unsafe practices in the name of convenience, such as hardcoding secrets into the application source code or sharing secrets with team members via insecure communication channels […]
If you are like me, you have used cloud services in a limited fashion to create VM’s for testing or perhaps you have used them extensively. You’d also like to gain an understanding of the broader group of services offered by cloud providers. In my situation, this was due to the recent attainment of an Engagement Manager position and my desire to help AIS expand our business through the development of new opportunities. I realized that I needed to have […]
Over the last couple of years, I’ve moved from serious SharePoint on-premise development to migrating web applications to Azure. My exposure to Azure prior to the first application was standing up SharePoint development virtual machines that pretty much just used the base settings. Trial by fire tends to be the way I learn things best which is good because not only was I having to learn about Azure resources, but I also had to refamiliarize myself with web development practices […]
Data Lake has become a mainstay in data analytics architectures. By storing data in its native format, it allows organizations to defer the effort of structuring and organizing data upfront. This promotes data collection and serves as a rich platform for data analytics. Most data lakes are also backed by a distributed file system that enables massively parallel processing (MPP) and scales with even the largest of data sets. The increase of data privacy regulations and demands on governance requires […]
Once you’ve decided to instrument your ASP.NET Core application with Application Insights, you may be looking for how to anonymize or customize the data that is being sent to Application Insights. For details on why you should be using Application Insights and how to get started, please reference my previous post in this blog series. Two things to consider with telemetry: Adding additional telemetry that is not recorded by Application Insights. Removing or anonymizing data that is already being sent […]
Once you’ve decided to instrument your ASP.NET Core application with Application Insights, you may be looking for a quick way to troubleshoot telemetry configuration. For details on why you should be using Application Insights and how to get started, please reference my previous post in this blog series. How do you go about testing your telemetry configuration? Typically, developers would adjust the application and would then deploy to Azure, ideally your development environment in Azure. However, making a change to […]
When building a web API or web application it is critically important to know that the application is functioning as intended. Whether that be from a performance perspective or simply knowing that external clients are using the application correctly. Historically, for an on-premise solution that involves installing agent monitoring software and configuring a logging solution with associated storage management. With Azure, that now becomes a turn-key solution using Application Insights. Application Insights can be used whether your actual application is […]
When Agencies decide to move their applications to the commercial cloud, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) mandates specific approval and certification to connect the Cloud Access Point (CAP). In this blog post, I will describe the process for establishing connectivity for a mission application on Azure Government IL 5 environment to DoD the DISA CAP. This post is based on the document provided by DISA DoD Cloud Connection Process Guide. The site has information including connecting to the DoD DISA CAP for both cloud providers (AWS, AZURE …) and cloud consuming applications (“Mission Applications”). Unfortunately, […]
AIS is working with a large organization that wants to discover relationships between data and the business by iteratively integrating data from many sources into Azure Data Lake. The data will be analyzed by different groups within the organization to discover new factors that might affect the business. Data will then be published to the appropriate consumers using PowerBI. In the initial phase, data lake ingests data from some of the Operational Systems. Eventually, data will be captured not only from all the […]
This blog is a follow on about Azure Cognitive Services, Microsoft’s offering for enabling artificial intelligence (AI) applications in daily life. The offering is a collection of AI services with capabilities around speech, vision, search, language, and decision. Azure Personalizer is one of the services in the suit of Azure Cognitive Services, a cloud-based API service that allows you to choose the best experience to show to your users by learning from their real-time behavior. Azure Personalizer is based on […]