Azure

Many data projects fail to deliver the impact they should for a simple reason – they focus on the data. This series of posts explains a different way of thinking that will set up your data & analytics projects for success. Using an iterative, action-oriented, insight discovery process, it demonstrates tools and techniques that will help you to identify, define and prioritize requirements in your own projects so that they deliver maximum value. It also explores the synergy with modern cloud analytics platforms like Azure Synapse, explaining how the process and the architecture actively support each other for fast, impactful delivery.

The second in a series of posts talking about how and why we migrated an application from Azure Functions to Azure Container Apps

Many data projects fail to deliver the impact they should for a simple reason – they focus on the data. This series of posts explains a different way of thinking that will set up your data & analytics projects for success. Using an iterative, action-oriented, insight discovery process, it demonstrates tools and techniques that will help you to identify, define and prioritize requirements in your own projects so that they deliver maximum value. It also explores the synergy with modern cloud analytics platforms like Azure Synapse, explaining how the process and the architecture actively support each other for fast, impactful delivery.

Many data projects fail to deliver the impact they should for a simple reason – they focus on the data. This series of posts explains a different way of thinking that will set up your data & analytics projects for success. Using an iterative, action-oriented, insight discovery process, it demonstrates tools and techniques that will help you to identify, define and prioritize requirements in your own projects so that they deliver maximum value. It also explores the synergy with modern cloud analytics platforms like Azure Synapse, explaining how the process and the architecture actively support each other for fast, impactful delivery.

Many data projects fail to deliver the impact they should for a simple reason – they focus on the data. This series of posts explains a different way of thinking that will set up your data & analytics projects for success. Using an iterative, action-oriented, insight discovery process, it demonstrates tools and techniques that will help you to identify, define and prioritize requirements in your own projects so that they deliver maximum value. It also explores the synergy with modern cloud analytics platforms like Azure Synapse, explaining how the process and the architecture actively support each other for fast, impactful delivery.

The first in a series of posts talking about how and why we migrated an application from Azure Functions to Azure Container Apps

Office Scripts and Power Automate provide the ability to automate manual processes involving Excel in the cloud. This post provides and overview and walks through an example.

Have the recent changes to Azure CLI on Windows broken your dev inner loop when working with containerised applications that need access to Azure resources? If so, this post provides a workaround that will unblock you without having to be stuck on an old version of the Azure CLI.

The "Shared Metadata Model" is a powerful feature within Synapse Analytics that synchronizes Spark database objects with SQL Serverless. This article describes how to give non-admin users access to these synchronized objects in a least-privileged manner.

If you're interested in the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) and how it can simplify migrating existing workloads to use cloud platform services, then this series might be for you. In this post, we continue modifying the excellent Dapr Traffic Control sample application by swapping the MQTT-based messaging with Azure Storage Queues. We will also look at how you can use the Dapr programming model as an alternative to cloud-provider SDKs.

A lesser known feature of Azure Synapse is the "Shared Metadata Model". Synapse has the capability to automatically synchronize tables created via Synapse Spark with objects you can query via the usual SQL Serverless endpoint, without any additional configuration. This article brings attention to this capability, highlighting the benefits and tradeoffs vs rolling your own SQL Serverless VIEWs.

If you're interested in the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) and how it can simplify migrating existing workloads to use cloud platform services, then this series might be for you. In this post, we continue modifying the excellent Dapr Traffic Control sample application by adding Azure Key Vault integration for its secrets management.

Monetizing your APIs is a complex challenge; creating your business, revenue, & pricing model, then translating into a technical implementation requires significant investment. Working with the Azure API Management team we provide guidance, videos and code to help accelerate your journey.

Despite being inherently difficult to test, the need to validate data modelling, business rules and security boundaries in Power BI reports is important, as well as the need for ensuring that quality doesn't regress over time as the insights evolve. This post explains that, by executing DAX queries over underlying tabular model, it is possible to execute scenario-based specifications to add quality gates and build confidence in Power BI reports, just as any other software project.

The new Power BI ExecuteQueries REST API presents a number of new opportunities for Power BI developers in terms of tooling, process and integrations. This post highlights some of the key advantages of this new capability.

If you're interested in the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) and how it can simplify migrating existing workloads to use cloud platform services, then this series might be for you. In this post, taking the excellent Dapr Traffic Control sample application as our starting point, we look at enabling PaaS Pub-Sub using Azure Service Bus.

If you're interested in the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) and how it can simplify migrating existing workloads to use cloud platform services, then this series might be for you. Taking the excellent Dapr Traffic Control sample application as our starting point, we will iteratively migrate components to use Azure cloud platform services.

Bicep provides a significant improvement in tooling for organisations seeking to deploy infrastructure as code on Microsoft Azure.

SQL Serverless in Azure Synapse provides a structured way to query your data on-demand directly from your data lake. This consumption-based, flexible approach to data warehousing provides a compelling alternative to the traditional star-schema or RDBMS, but comes with it's own set of new challenges. This post explores some of the considerations around managing schemas in a serverless world, including an approach for ensuring that your data and schema remain in sync.

Static Web Apps are Microsoft's offering for hosting static web applications on Azure. This post runs through how to deploy a VueJS application to a Static Web App using a YAML-defined Azure Devops pipeline.

Carmel has recently released an exam tips course on preparing for the AZ-204 exam: Developing solutions for Microsoft Azure! The course gives an overview of the syllabus, some tips on what you'll need to know for each section, and some examples of common question types.

TL;DR - Using Azure Synapse SQL Serverless, you can query Azure Data Lake and populate Power BI reports across multiple workspaces.

Interactive Spark notebooks are an incredibly powerful tool for data exploration and experimentation. And in Azure Synapse, the time to (business) value is significantly decreased due to tight integration with Pipelines and monitoring tooling. But as with any software process, the need to validate business rules is important, as is ensuring that quality doesn't regress over time - especially so in such a collaborative and productive environment. This post looks at some simple ways to add testing to your Synapse Notebooks.

The first in a series of posts talking about how to best work with configuration in Azure Functions

Did you know that there's a null-safe operator in Azure Data Factory's expression syntax? No? Well, now you do. Here's how you can safely reference an activity output that might not always exist.

A rundown of how to trigger an Azure Synapse pipeline run from C# code.

Modern analytics requires a multi-faceted approach, which can cause integration headaches. Azure Synapse's Swiss army knife approach can remove a lot of friction.

Data Engineers/Developers want to get access to Azure Synapse Analytics as quickly as possible to start designing and creating their data solutions. Being denied access to Synapse Studio can be frustrating and slows matters down. This article will address the "You need permission to access workspace..." error, discuss what causes it, and describe how to fix it.

Azure Synapse Analytics developers need to be assigned a role within Synapse Studio in order to access the GUI. The Azure CLI provides one way of programmatically achieving this, which can be done by any Owner or Contributor of the Azure Synapse Analytics resource.

Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB is a game-changing piece in the Synapse suite of services - extending the support for SQL on Demand to enable querying over the Cosmos DB Analytical Store. This post explores whether the term 'full stack serverless' should now be extended to cover No-ETL and pay-as-you-query analytics, alongside serverless application architectures.

Wishing Azure Synapse Analytics had support for SQL notebooks? Fear not, it's easy to take advantage rich interactive notebooks for SQL Pools and SQL on Demand.

Tracking down unexpected allocations in a high-performance .NET parsing library.

Azure AD B2C is easy to integrate and configure for simple sign-in / sign-up authentication. But there's a step change in complexity as soon as you want to do something outside of the built-in user flows. An "invite user" flow is one such example, but it's also a fairly common requirement in any business or team orientated SaaS application, which makes AAD B2C as less attractive choice. This post describes an alternative approach for this authentication feature that avoids the need for AAD B2C custom policies, allowing you to keep authentication as simple as possible.

Azure Synapse Analytics is Microsoft's new unified cloud analytics platform, which will surely be playing a big part in many organizations' technology stacks in the near future. For many organizations, Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are the infrastructure deployment method of choice. This blog explains how to deploy an Azure Synapse Analytics workspace using an ARM template.

Do you need to encrypt a piece of data in your application? Do you want Azure Key Vault to secure the key? Well, using C# along with a couple of libraries from the Azure SDK, it couldn't be easier to get up and running. This blog explains how to do just that.

Carmel recently passed the 'Az-204 - Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure' exam. Here she shares how she went about preparing!

Serverless data architectures enable leaner data insights and operations. How do you reap the rewards while avoiding the potential pitfalls?

I was recently invited on to Microsoft Mechanics to talk about the new on-demand SQL Serverless offering within Azure Synapse. If you have been following along with my previous blog posts you will know that we've been hard at work applying Azure Synapse against real customer workloads. In the video I take you through the service by solving a real-world IoT problem for one of our telco customers.

There is a new service in town that promises to transform the way you query the contents of your data lake. Azure Synapse Analytics comes with a new offering called SQL Serverless allowing you to query your data on-demand with no need for pre-provisioned resources.When we heard about the new service we were keen to get involved, so for the last 10 months we've been working with the SQL Serverless product group to provide feedback on the service and to help ensure it meets our customers needs. During this time we've put it through it's paces by implementing a range of real-world use cases. We were particularly interested to see how it stacked up as a replacement for Data Lake Analytics, where to date there has been no clear and easy migration path.

Did you know that Azure Synapse has great support for .NET and #csharp? Learning new languages is often a barrier to digital transformation, being able to use existing people, skills, tools and engineering disciplines can be a massive advantage.

Have you ever needed an automated process to use alternative credentials for a subset of tasks? This post will demonstrate a technique that allows you setup multiple, concurrent authenticated sessions when using the azure-cli and switch freely between them.

Have you or are you about to invest in Azure Databricks? If so, the new Spark offering in Azure Synapse Analytics is likely to have grabbed your attention and rightly so. Why is Microsoft putting yet another Spark offering on the table and what does it mean for you?

For years we have been building modern cloud data solutions on Azure and helping our customers transform their use of data to drive outcomes. Here are 5 reasons why Azure Synapse Analytics might just be the service that we have been crying out for.

Whilst "read/write XMLA endpoint" might seem like a technical mouthful, its addition to Power BI is a significant milestone in the strategy of bringing Power BI and Analysis Services closer together. As well as closing the gap between IT-managed workloads and self-service BI, it presents a number of new opportunities for Power BI developers in terms of tooling, process and integrations. This post highlights some of the key advantages of this new capability and what they mean for the Power BI developer.

Azure Key Vault is used to protect encryption keys and secrets. These keys and secrets can be used to access encrypted data and protected services. Individual Key Vaults can be used to preserve security information for isolating keys and secrets. The keys stored can be either hardware or software protected. Access to the keys and secrets is controlled using Azure Active Directory, RBAC and access policies.

Despite being inherently difficult to test, the need to validate data modelling, business rules and security boundaries in Power BI reports is important, as well as the need for ensuring that quality doesn't regress over time as the insights evolve. This post explains that, by connecting to the underlying tabular model, it is possible to execute scenario-based specifications to add quality gates and build confidence in Power BI reports, just as any other software project.

Jess and Carmel recently gave a talk at Azure Oxford on "Combatting illegal fishing with Machine Learning and Azure - for less than £10 / month). The recording of that talk is now available for viewing!The talk focuses on the recent work we completed with OceanMind. They run through how to construct a cloud-first architecture based on serverless and data analytics technologies and explore the important principles and challenges in designing this kind of solution. Finally, we see how the architecture we designed through this process not only provides all the benefits of the cloud (reliability, scalability, security), but because of the pay-as-you-go compute model, has a compute cost that we could barely believe!

Whilst testing Power BI Dataflows isn't something that many people think about, it's critical that business rules and associated data preparation steps are validated to ensure the right insights are available to the right people across the organisation. Data insights are useless, even dangerous, if they can't be trusted, so despite the lack of "official support" or recommended approaches from Microsoft, endjin treat Power BI solutions just as any other software project with respect to testing - building automated quality gates into the end to end development process. This post outlines an approach that endjin has used to test Power BI Dataflows to add quality gates and build confidence in large and complex Power BI solutions.

Azure Analysis Services provides an enterprise-grade analytical platform with massive scale and flexibility. But, as one of the more expensive services in the Azure platform, consideration should be given to cost management, especially in multi-environment ALM scenarios. This post explains how to massively reduce running costs through automation using Powershell and orchestration tools like Azure DevOps.

At endjin, our approach focuses on using scientific experimental method to support the creation of fully proved and tested decision making, and the use of scientific research to support our work. This post runs through how we applied that process to creation a pipeline to detect vessel proximity.This is an example which is based around the project we recently worked on with OceanMind. In this project we helped them to build a #serverless architecture which could detect vessel proximity in close to real time. The vessel proximity events we detected were then fed into machine learning algorithms in order to detect illegal fishing!Carmel also runs through some of the actual calculations we used to detect proximity, how we used #data projections to efficiently process large quantitities of incoming data, and the use of #durablefunctions to orchestrate the processing.

This post explains how to update Azure Analysis Services model schemas from inside custom .NET applications. Whilst not a common scenario for most, it shows that this is easy to do using the AMO SDK. So, there's nothing stopping you from developing complex and rich end-user functionality over the top of your data analysis solutions - providing run-time, user-driven schema changes like "what if" analysis.

Wardley Maps are a fantastic tool to help provide situational awareness, in order to help you make better decisions. We use Wardley Maps to help our customers think about the various benefits and trade-offs that can be made when migrating to the Cloud. In this blog post, Jess Panni demonstrates how we used Wardley Maps to plan the migration of OceanMind to Microsoft Azure, and how the maps highlighted where the core value of their platform was, and how PaaS and Serverless services offered the most value for money for the organisation.

If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you'll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the final post in this series, we show how to ensure specs written using Corvus.Testing can run as part of your build pipeline.

If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you'll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the fourth of this series of posts, we look at how configuration can be supplied from your tests to the functions apps being tested.

If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you'll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the third of a series of posts, we look at using classes in the Corvus.Testing library to run functions apps via scenario and feature hooks.

If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you'll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the second of a series of posts, we look at using step bindings provided by the Corvus.Testing library to run functions apps as part of your SpecFlow scenarios.

If you use Azure Functions on a regular basis, you'll likely have grappled with the challenge of testing them. Even now, several years after their introduction, the testing story for Functions is not hugely well defined. In the first of a series of posts, we look at some different approaches to testing your functions apps, and introduce the Corvus.Testing library.

Integrating Azure Analysis Services into custom applications doesn't just mean read-only data querying. But if your application changes the underlying model, it will need to be re-processed before the changes take effect. This post describes how to use the REST API for Azure Analysis Services inside a custom .NET application to perform asynchronous model refreshes, meaning your applications can reliably and efficiently deal with model updates.

As part of our work with OceanMind, endjin wrote a high performance .NET AIS parser. AIS (Automatic Identification System) is how commercial ships report location information. This blog describes the parser, and the performance techniques it uses.

Being able to construct DAX queries dynamically in C# means the possibilities are endless in terms of integrating Azure Analysis Services queries into your custom applications, and with the code samples in this post, you have everything you need to get started.

The theme of this year's British Science Week (6 - 15 March 2020) is "Our Diverse Planet". We'll be getting involved by speaking to school children about the work we've been doing with Oxfordshire-based OceanMind (part of the Microsoft AI for Good programme) to help them combat illegal fishing, hopefully inspiring some of the next generation of data scientists!

The Azure CNAB Quickstart Templates we've created are only half the story. Much of the work we've done over the last few months involved the authoring, contribution and DevOps pipelines required to support an open source project. The project is inspired by the original Azure Quickstart Templates - which over the last 5 years has grown to over 850 templates. In this post we're going to explain how you can author CNAB templates and contribute them.

Porter is a tool based on the CNAB (Cloud Native Application Bundle) spec. It can be used for building, managing, and installing application bundles. This guide will walk you through how to get set up with Porter on Windows.

In partnership with Microsoft, we have released Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library on GitHub. CNAB (Cloud-Native Application Bundle) is a new specification designed for facilitating the packaging, installation, upgrading and uninstallation of cloud-native solutions in the cloud, on-premise or on the edge. We've created a number of quickstarts covering Apache Airflow, Azure Kubernetes Service, Ghost, Kubeflow, SQL Server Always On and Wordpress to help demonstrate the power of CNAB and Porter.

In this post we show how a combination of Kubernetes, Azure Durable Functions and Azure API Management can be used to make legacy batch processing code available as a RESTful API. This is a great example of how serverless technologies can be used to expose legacy software to the public internet in a controlled way, allowing you to reap some of the benefits of a cloud first approach without fully rewriting and migrating existing software.

Integrating Azure Analysis Services into custom applications means more than just querying the data. By surfacing the metadata in your models, you can build dynamic and customisable UIs and APIs, tailored to the needs of the client application. This post explains how easy it is to query model metadata from .NET, so you can create deeper integrations between your data insights and your custom applications.

One of the first steps in integrating Azure Analysis Services into your applications is creating and opening a connection to the server - just like any other database technology. This post explains the ins and outs of creating Azure Analysis Services connections, including code samples for each of the key scenarios.

Ed attended NDC London 2020, along with many of his endjin colleagues. In this post he summarises and reflects upon his favourite sessions of the conference including; "OWASP Top Ten proactive controls" by Jim Manico, "There's an Impostor in this room!" by Angharad Edwards, "How to code music?" by Laura Silvanavičiūtė, "ML and the IoT: Living on the Edge" by Brandon Satrom, "Common API Security Pitfalls" by Philippe De Ryck, and "Combatting illegal fishing with Machine Learning and Azure - for less than £10 / month" by Jess Panni & Carmel Eve.

Along with several of my endjin colleagues, I attended NDC London in January this year - here's a run through of the sessions I attended on Day 3 and my thoughts. This final day was a mixed bag, taking in talks on drumming and AKKA.net, as well as something a bit more close to home - a session from endjin's own Jess Panni and Carmel Eve on our recent project for OceanMind.

Along with several of my endjin colleagues, I attended NDC London in January this year - here's a run through of the sessions I attended on Day 2 and my thoughts. This day was UI heavy, with sessions on Vuejs and UI testing, but I also learned more about GraphQL and writing high performance C# code.

A retrospective of my first day at NDC London 2020, taking in sessions on AI and Machine Learning, Capability Mapping, Micro Frontends, Diagnostics and Blazor.

With a variety of integration support through client SDKs, PowerShell cmdlets and REST APIs, it can be hard to know where to start with integrating Azure Analysis Services into your custom applications. This posts walks through the options, and lays out a simple guide to choosing the right framework.

We've done a lot of work at endjin with Azure Analysis Services over the last couple of years - but none of it has been what you'd call "traditional BI". We've pulled, twisted and bent it in all sorts of directions, using it's raw analytical processing power to underpin bespoke analysis products and processes. This post explains some of the common (and not-so-common) reasons why you might want to do similar things, and how Azure Analysis Services might be the key to unlocking your data insights.

Towards the end of last year, Microsoft invited endjin along to a hackathon session they hosted at the IET in London as part of their AI for Good initiative. I've been thinking about the event and the broader work Microsoft is doing here a lot lately, because it gets to the heart of what I love about working in this industry: computers can magnify our power to do to good.

In this blog from the Azure Advent Calendar 2019 we discuss building a secure data solution using Azure Data Lake. Data Lake has many features which enable fine grained security and data separation. It is also built on Azure Storage which enables us to take advantage of all of those features and means that ADLS is still a cost effective storage option!This post runs through some of the great features of ADLS and runs through an example of how we build our solutions using this technology!

In January 2020, Carmel is speaking about creating high performance geospatial algorithms in C# which can detect suspicious vessel activity, which is used to help alert law enforcement to illegal fishing. The input data is fed from Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2, and converted into data projections optimised for high-performance computation. This code is then hosted in Azure Functions for cheap, consumption based processing.

Are you configuring your Azure App Service to use a VNet? The regional VNet integration for an Azure App Service is a preview feature, and so comes with some quirks. One of the documented limitations of this preview feature is that "The feature is only available from newer App Service scale units that support PremiumV2 App Service plans." This has interesting implications as to how you need to deploy your App Service, otherwise you could end up with a rather perplexing pattern of errors. Read about how we came about this error, and how we ended up fixing it.

GitHub Actions is GitHub's new CI/CD platform. It is comparable with Azure Pipelines, which forms part of the Azure DevOps suite. In this post, Mike Larah looks at the similarities and differences in the high-level concepts and terminology between the two platforms.

While on first inspection Azure Function look like a good candidate for long running operations as they can run for 10 minutes on a Consumption plan, HTTP Triggers only run for 230 seconds because of a limitation with the Azure Load Balancer. In this blog post Jess Panni demonstrates how Durable Functions can be used instead.

Remote working allows us to work from anywhere we want. This brings a huge amount of flexibility in freedom, however we do need the help of a working laptop! When Carmel's laptop gave in just before a trip, she used Azure DevTestLabs to allow her to continue to work using a 10 year old Mac that probably couldn't wouldn't have been up to the task alone...

For one of my first experiments with the Raspberry Pi 4, I decided to get an Azure Function running in a Docker container. This post gives a step-by-step guide on how to do it, as well as providing code you can use a starting point for your own experiments.

Building a secure solution on Azure can be a daunting task. Using Azure Functions and Managed Identities, we have built up a pattern for giving services access to one another, woithout the need to store credentials. These managed identities can be given access to necessary resources. For example, they can be granted roles and added to access control lists in ADLS Gen2 accounts, or the ability to access keys in key vault. This means that data can be securely accessed without needing to store connection strings or app passwords.

Whilst some of the Azure Active Directory PowerShell for Graph module (AzureAD) functionality has been rolled into the new Azure PowerShell Az module, it's not currently (and might never be) a replacement for the full power of what you can achieve with AzureAD. So, there's every chance you'll find yourself needing to use both side-by-side. This post explains how to do that using the new cross-platform PowerShell Core.

A Power BI based solution typically consists of a variety of technologies - for example Azure data platform services containing source data. As such, automation of Power BI resources needs to be considered as part of a wider DevOps strategy. This post describes the specific steps needed in order to fully automate the creation and security of Power BI workspaces using Powershell and Azure DevOps pipelines.

Here at endjin we've done a lot of work around data analysis and ETL. As part of this we have done some work with Databricks Notebooks on Microsoft Azure. Notebooks can be used for complex and powerful data analysis using Spark. Spark is a "unified analytics engine for big data and machine learning". It allows you to run data analysis workloads, and can be accessed via many APIs. This means that you can build up data processes and models using a language you feel comfortable with. They can also be run as an activity in a ADF pipeline, and combined with Mapping Data Flows to build up a complex ETL process which can be run via ADF.

Mapping Data Flows are a relatively new feature of ADF. They allow you to visually build up complex data transformation sequences. This can aid in the streamlining of data manipulation and ETL processes, without the need to write any code! This post gives a brief introduction to the technology, and what this could enable!

This blog post details how we used Azure Policy to enforce Azure resources were tagged with appropiate tags and ensured tags were inherited from parent resource groups where possible.

This post walks through the fix for DLL locking errors when trying to deploy an Azure Function. The solution was to switch over to the new "deploy from package" option when deploying the functions. This fixes the file locking problem because instead of deploying the DLLs, the function will run from a package file added to its directory.

Using PowerShell and the VM Custom Script Extension to download and execute scripts on existing Azure VMs

The complexities around Azure Active Directory can be difficult to understand. This post runs through some of the key concepts - AAD apps, service principles, managed identities, and walks through an example of how to set some of this up!

If you're using the Gremlin API for Cosmos DB, you can now see how much each operation costs in Request Units.

Ian Griffiths recently joined endjin as a Technical Fellow. We had a long fireside chat, which has been broken down into a 5 part series covering .NET, the Cloud, AI, ML, teaching software engineering, and why he joined endjin.

The OpenAPI SDK based OpenAPI document converters extension has been updated to support Visual Studio 2017.

Read how we set up Azure spending alerts and saved over $10k

We have lots of experience working with Azure Cosmos DB, and we're sharing some of our knowledge at Microsoft's Future Decoded event.

Rest APIs underpin many Digital Transformation strategies. As with all software projects the devil is in the detail; your API strategy, governance, security, design principals are as, if not more imporant than building a working API.

We've been helping customers adopt Microsoft Azure since 2010, we have produced a lot of thought leadership to help people think about the steps required, the risk involved and how to plan a successful adoption.

We've just released an updated version of our Azure Technology Selector poster - helping you to choose the right Azure service, based on your use-case.

There were so many good sessions at Microsoft BUILD 2017, we selected our highlights of sessions that you should make time to catch up with.

Sometimes you want to build a Power BI dashboard that pulls in data from two different data sources. In this blog post Alice Waddicor demonstrates how you can use DirectQuery and multiple databased via ElasticQuery.

In the third and final part in this series we compare the risk of Azure vs the risk of on-premise data centres, using the Swiss Cheese Risk Model.

One very useful but little used pattern when working with Resource Manager templates, is the ability to use parameters to optionally deploy resources, constrain certain resource configurations based on other user defined parameters, or to toggle parameters based on other values. This blog post explores some of these options.

Read about how we set up automated backups of our office security camera footage and used Power Automate to alert us if anything went wrong

This post shows how to add a Power BI Embedded report to an ASP.NET Core application.

In the second part of this series, we take a deep dive into the Swiss Cheese Model and show how this type of threat modelling is essential for understanding the risks that adopting Microsoft Azure post your organisation, and how you mitigate them.

Did you know that you can fully automate the bootstrapping process of setting up an Azure DevOps enviornment? This post shows you how.

In the world of DevOps, cloud and platform services, how does a developer's "definition of done" need to change? This post argues that as the silos of development and operations are broken down, the responsibility of understanding the whole solution increases meaning, to truly take advantage of the cloud, the need for quality and professionalism is critical for success.

Learn how to combine the power of Azure Resource Manager and Octopus Deploy for a frictionless Azure DevOps experience.

In the first part of this series, we look at how you take a strategic look at the risks of adopting Microsoft Azure, and how you report these to C-level execs.

Azure Machine Learning Studio is a fantastic service for experimentation, but you can also easily productionize your machine learning models. In this post we show how to create an Azure ML Studio web service and test it using Postman.

Meta-Runners allow you to easily create reusable build components for TeamCity, in this post I demonstrate how to create a Meta-Runner to create Azure Application Insights Release Annotations.

We've improved our approach for saving money by turning off our virtual machines outside of office hours. This post explored how to do it using graphical runbooks.

We have produced an insightful booklet called "Embracing Disruption - Financial Services and the Microsoft Cloud" which examines the challenges and opportunities for the Financial Service Industry in the UK, through the lens of Microsoft Azure, Security, Privacy & Data Sovereignty, Data Ingestion, Transformation & Enrichment, Big Compute, Big Data, Insights & Visualisation, Infrastructure, Ops & Support, and the API Economy.

Hymans Robertson was set up in Glasgow in 1921 and is one of the longest established independent firms of consultants and actuaries in the UK. Hymans Robertson soon realised that the computational requirements of their models exceeded the capacity of their on-premise datacentres and that the most cost effective solution would be to use the cloud to perform their Big Compute. But before they could harness the cloud to help them solve their Big Data problems, the business needed to understand the ramifications of moving to the cloud; everything from regulatory, risk and compliance concerns,  to how their internal Ops team would need to evolve and adapt, and how to deal with moving data from on-prem into the cloud.

There is a lot of hype about the blockchain - usually wrapped up with talk about Bitcoin and crypto-currencies. In this article, we look at its impact on trust, and auditability in financial services, and why it may (or may not) be appropriate for your solutions.

In this post we review the FCA's guidelines for the adoption of cloud services by FinTech businesses, and help you to understand their impact across the value chain.

To celebrate FinTech Week, we've released an eBook based our our talk about Disruption in Financial Services at Future Decoded.

Learn how to authenticate against Azure Resource Manager using PowerShell, for fully automated deployments.

We've reached our first milestone - a whole year of publishing Azure Weekly. To celebrate we're giving away stuff!

Consumption based pricing is a one of the USPs of Cloud PaaS services, but the default settings aren't necessarily optimised for cost. Significant savings can be made from understanding your workload.

Azure Resource Manager and PowerShell Desired State Configuration are powerful tools for provisioning and then configuring your virutal machines in Azure. This post delves into the details.

We recently completed a technical proof of concept to see if the new Azure Batch service could scale to meet the demands of a Big Compute workload.

We use SpecFlow to write integration tests against Azure. In this post we share an Open Source SpecFlow extension for the Azure Storage Emulator.

A CDN, short for Content Delivery Network, is essentially a network of servers set-up, in various geographic locations, with the aim of speeding up the delivery of content to end-users across the Internet.

Everything in Azure runs in Coordinated Universal Time; learn how to deal with Daylight saving time in Azure Automation, so your jobs still run on time.

If you have private NuGet feeds, restoring packages during a CI/CD process can be a challenge. This post provides a solution when working with Azure App Service.

Just because you're using the cloud, doesn't mean you don't use traditional DTAP environments. But you do need to configure your cloud services to understand them.

In this post we demonstrate how to use New Relic to monitor an Azure Cloud Service Worker Role, step by step.

To help guide the client through the selection process (and to act as an aide memoire when we come to try and remember why particular choices were made), we created a handy flow-chart to take you through the technology landscape, and suggest some recommended-practice solutions.

Learn how to use diagnostics in Azure Virtual Machines and Cloud Service Web or Worker Roles using the Azure SDK.

One of the strongest selling points of cloud computing is that you only pay for what you use. Running virtual machines can become expensive, but you can save significant money if you turn those VMs off outside of office hours.

We've delivered a number of Elasticsearch solutions on Azure. In this second post in the series, we share some useful tips.

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We created an an automated, telephony-based candidate interviewing system using .NET and Azure. We used New Relic and Twilio to simplify first line support. In this post we delve into some of the technical details.

By utilising the IP and Domain Restrictions feature in IIS, it is possible to lock down your Azure Website to only allow access to IP addresses and domains that you have specified in a accept list. Learn how in this post.

We've built a number of Elasticsearch clusters on Microsoft Azure. This blog post contains some of our top tips and gotchas.

Learn how to use PowerShell Remoting to connect to an Azure Virtual Machine; a useful technique for managing servers like cattle, not pets.

A quick tip on fixing a 'remote desktop could not connect' error on Azure Virtual Machines.

This post shows how to use your Office 365 SMTP relay to enable email notification from TeamCity and YouTrack hosted in Azure.

If you use Azure Management Studio, you can quickly setup your connections by importing your publish settings...

A quick tip for updating your Azure cloud service configuration while running in the emulator

We've just released a free Cloud Migration Process poster to help you understand the complexities of evaluating & executing different cloud migration strategies.

Some thoughts on RavenDB after using it to build a content-managed website.