Azure Cognitive Search enables developers to build rich search experiences over private data for web, mobile and enterprise applications. — Azure Cognitive Search is a search service in Azure that gives you as a developer the tools for building search experiences over private data in your enterprise, web and mobile applications. Common use cases for search can include any scenario that surfaces text to users, such as searching a product…

Dapr’s Pub/Sub API simplifies the implementation of pub/sub functionality in distributed architectures. — In event-driven architectures, communicating between different microservices via messages can be enabled using Publish and Subscribe functionality (Pub/Sub for short). The publisher (or producer) writes messages to a message topic (or queue), while a subscriber will subscribe to that particular topic and receives the message. Both the publisher and subscriber…

With workload identities, we can authenticate GitHub Action workflows to deploy resources to Azure, without needing to manage secrets. — As I’ve been working on my side project, I’ve been trying to work on my CI/CD skills and deploy all my resources through GitHub Actions. This project is made up of a couple of services, which each have their own infrastructure and application code. …

Using Cron job bindings in Dapr, we can run background workers and tasks on a schedule — I’ve been thinking about migrating one of my side projects from Azure Functions to the Dapr framework to make it more portable. One of the most important components of this architecture is the ability to refresh an authentication token that enables each Function app to retrieve data from an external…

Dapr’s State Management API simplifies handling state in distributed architectures, removing the need to write service-specific code and reducing application complexity — In distributed architectures, we’ll usually have a number of independent stateless services that serve a purpose (set around a domain, such as ordering items, storing items in a catalog, handling authentication etc.) While services should strive to be stateless, there will be some services that need to track state in…

With Dedicated workload profiles, we can provision Container App environments with dedicated hardware, providing more resources to our Container Apps than Serverless workload profiles. — About mid-April, the Azure Container Apps team announced a public preview of a new hosting plan and pricing structure for hosting your Container Apps. By default, there was a Serverless consumption hosting plan which you can use to host your Container Apps. …

Azure virtual networks (VNets) enable cloud engineers to build secure and scalable networks in Azure — What are virtual networks? As you look to move workloads to the cloud, it’s important to have a secure and scalable network infrastructure that can support your applications. In Azure, this is where virtual networks come in. Virtual networks (VNet for short) are the fundamental building block for your private network in Azure. They…

As part of Azure Monitor, we can use Log Analytics to conduct queries on our log data, providing insights on insfrastructure and troubleshooting operational incidents. — What is Log Analytics? Azure Log Analytics is a tool as part of Azure Monitor that we can use to query data stored in the Azure Monitor Logs store. As administrators or developers, we would use Log Analytics in the Azure portal to configure input data sources (such as Container Apps, App Service, Cosmos…

Azure Container Apps manages automatic horizontal scaling through declarative scaling rules, utilizing KEDA scalers. — Azure Container Apps manages automatic horizontal scaling through declarative scaling rules. We can scale out our container apps based on a variety of different KEDA scalers. I recorded a video over the weekend covering how scaling works in Azure Container Apps, what KEDA is and how to set scaling rules…