Azure App Configuration helps you manage application settings and control their access centrally. It’s built on the simple concept of key-value pairs, and this service provides manageability, availability, and ease-of-use.
Azure App Configuration provides the following benefits:
Universal, fully managed configuration store for configuration and feature management
Provides fast retrieval of configurations for any application in Azure, on-prem or in other clouds
Complete data encryption, at rest or in transit
Improve security by separating configuration from code
Reduce configuration complexity across multiple environments
Native integrations with popular frameworks such as .NET, Azure Functions, and Java Spring
An ever-increasing number of enterprises, even as they adopt a hybrid IT strategy, continue to retain mission-critical data on-premises and look towards the public cloud as an effective offsite for their backups. Azure Backup?Azure?s built-in data-protection solution, provides a simple, secure, and cost-effective mechanism to backup these data-assets over the network to Azure, while eliminating on-premises backup infrastructure. After the initial full backup of data, Azure Backup transfers only incremental changes in the data, thereby delivering continued savings on both network and storage.
With the exponential growth in critical enterprise data, the initial full backups are reaching terabyte scale. Transferring these large full-backups over the network, especially in high-latency network environments or remote offices, may take weeks or even months. Our customers are looking for more efficient ways beyond fast networks to transfer these large initial backups to Azure. Microsoft Azure Data Box solves the problem of transferring…
This week GitHub announced the beta for their new GitHub CLI tool, which provides an easier and more seamless way for you to interact with GitHub from your terminal.
The GitHub CLI can be installed on Windows, macOS and Linux. Get started by downloading the installer from the GitHub CLI repository.
Once you have it downloaded, open up your terminal and use the gh command:
The GitHub CLI beta currently allows you to do the following commands:
Pull requests: Using the pr command to checkout, create, list, status and view
Issues: Using the issue command to create, list, status and view
Help: Using help command to see how to use the tool
When you first use it you will need to authenticate the GitHub CLI. As you can see here I will be prompted to open GitHub in my browser:
After authenticating the GitHub CLI you will be able to continue with your last command:
I needed to change directories to where my repository was and then I was able to list out my pull requests using the following command:
gh pr list
For more details about what can be done, check out the GitHub CLI manual for lots of examples on using each of the commands.
Wrap up
This is an early look at what can be done with the GitHub CLI, and because it’s still in early development the team would love for you to give the tool a try and then provide them feedback.
Earlier this week I noticed that Microsoft launched the Azure Apps Demo Map website, a centralized way to see a some awesome resources available by Microsoft for building enterprise applications that leverage Azure technologies..
Most of the scenarios include an interactive user experience to explore the solution – including solution diagrams, live demos, source code and additional resources.
When exploring a scenario you can click on sections to see what technologies were used for that particular application. In the case of the Rewards application, it uses Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and App Service.
After exploring the interactive model you can head over to the GitHub project to download and run the code so that you can dig really deep in how the solution was built.
Let’s take a brief look at each of the projects.
Projects
Currently the Azure Apps Demo Map contains four applications as listed below.
Tailwind Traders
Tailwind Traders is a fictitious retail company showcasing the future of intelligent application experiences. These reference apps are all powered by the Azure cloud, built with best-in-class tools, and made smarter through data and AI.
SmartHotel360 is a fictitious smart hospitality company showcasing the future of connected travel. Their vision is to provide an intelligent and personalized experience to the guests.
The geek version of the classic game. This sample shows a multilanguage application running on AKS with a front-end developed in Blazor and integrated with Azure Machine Learning and Azure Cognitive Services. Start the battle and find if you can beat our bot! VISIT PROJECT
Contoso Air is a fictitious airline company. This lab shows how to create a website application that runs Node.JS Server that stores customer booked flights in an Azure Cosmos DB.
Unfortunately this project has no diagram and has been archived. However this project still contains valuable information for building a Node.JS + Cosmos DB application and running it on Azure.
This is a great resource to learn how Azure can be used for an end to end solution for your business.
They have a feedback link so if you found the resource useful or you have suggestions please let them know. It would be cool to see this resource be expanded to include other applications that include Power BI, Power Apps, Azure DevOps, Dynamics, etc.
In this post I’ll walk through what is Azure App Configuration and how to get started using it in your applications, whether their on-prem or in the cloud.
What is Azure App Configuration?
Before we get started with Azure App Configuration lets first look at what is it. Microsoft docs explains it as follows…
Azure App Configuration provides a service to centrally manage application settings and feature flags.
Azure App Configuration helps you manage application settings and control their access centrally. It’s built on the simple concept of key-value pairs, and this service provides manageability, availability, and ease-of-use.
With modern programs, especially programs running in a cloud, you have many components that are distributed in nature. Spreading configuration settings across these components can lead to hard-to-troubleshoot errors during an application deployment. One key recommendation from the Twelve-Factor App guide is to separate configuration from code.
By leveraging Azure App Configuration to store all the settings for your application and secure their accesses in one place, you can simplify your deployment tasks and eases the burden of dealing with permutations of configurations created by multiple applications, dependencies, and environments.
Let’s get started!
Prerequisites
Before we can begin you need to make sure you have the following installed and setup:
An Azure Subscription. If you don’t have an Azure Account, you can sign up for one today for free and receive $200 in credits by selecting “Create a Free Azure Account…” or selecting “View->Command Palette” and searching for “Azure: Create an Account”
Login to your Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com and click on the Create a resource link as shown here:
Next in the search field type ‘app configuration’ and press ‘Enter’. Then click on the Create button to create your Azure App Configuration. Currently this service is in preview but should be generally available soon.
When setting up your Azure App Configuration you will need to specify a few settings like Resource Name, Subscription, Resource Group, Location and Pricing Tier. Here is the resource that I’ll be setting up:
Now click on the Create button to have your resource created, which typically takes a minute or two. You will be notified in the Notifications area of the portal when your resource is ready.
Once your Azure App Configuration is created, navigate to it and you will see the following overview page that shows you your Endpoint for accessing your configurations along with other resource information.
Azure App Configuration overview
Now navigate to the Configuration explorer to start creating configurations values. Click on the Create button and select Key-value.
Now create a simple configuration called ‘Color’ and give it a value of ‘Blue’ and click Apply.
In order to access your configurations you will need your connection string and key. Navigate to the Access keys section to view your keys and connection string information.
Supported Platforms
At the time of this writing, Azure App Configuration provides configuration support for ASP.NET Core, .NET Core, .NET Framework, Azure Functions in .NET Core, and Java Spring. For Feature Management, it supports ASP.NET Core, .NET Framework, and Java Spring.
Pricing and General Availability
Earlier this week the Azure App Configuration team announced that Azure App Configuration would be made generally available on February 19, 2020.
Initially there will be two types of plans, Free and Standard. Until February 19 both plans will continue to be free, and after February 19 all plans will be migrated to the Free plan. You can choose to stay on this plan or upgrade to the Standard plan. Pricing has remained unchanged from a previous post and will commence on February 19.
Free
Standard
Resources per subscription
1
Unlimited
Storage per resource
10 MB
1 GB
Key history
7 days
30 days
Requests per day
1,000 (HTTP status code 429 will be returned for all requests once the limit is reached)
Unlimited (First 200,000 included in the daily charge. Additional requests will be billed as overage)
SLA
None
99.9% availability
Security functionality
Encryption with Microsoft-managed keys HMAC or AAD authentication RBAC support Managed identity
All Free tier functionality plus: Encryption with customer-managed keys Private Link support
Cost
Free
US$1.20 per day, plus any overage charge at US$0.06 per 10,000 requests
Azure App Configuration pricing plans
Wrap-up
Azure App Configuration is a managed service that helps developers centralize their application and feature settings simply and securely.
I’ve been using it in my applications for the last few months and I love how easy it’s been to incorporate into my applications. I’m really excited that Azure App Configuration is nearing general availability later this month and I’m looking forward to what’s coming next, namely around Feature Management as this is still a simple offering and it will be nice when it’s available on more frameworks.
In my next post I’ll walk through in more detail about how you can import/export your configurations, compare them over time and use labels to filter certain values.
Registration for this years Microsoft Build event is now open and will be held in Seattle from May 19 to May 21. You can register at https://register.build.microsoft.com
Microsoft Build focuses on latest trends and future looking technology innovations for leading architects, developers, start-ups and student developers.
Pricing and free child admission
The cost for Build is $2,395 USD and is all-inclusive and provides all access for the full three days or hands-on learning where you can meet with the engineers, and connect with the community.
Just like last year you’re able to bring your aspiring developer (ages 14–21) to the conference, which includes access to the extraordinary Student Zone, for free. There is also a limited number of child passes available.
My Build experience
I had the opportunity to attend my first Microsoft Build conference back in 2018 and I loved it and would recommend it to any developer. I know you can watch almost all of the sessions online from the comfort of your desk or couch but what makes attending Build special is the interaction with the engineers working on Microsoft products like Azure, Office, Windows, Visual Studio and so much more. You also get to meet and share ideas with thousands of other developers from all over the world who have similar passions for building awesome software with Microsoft products.
This event sells out so be sure to register quickly. For more details about Microsoft Build visit the website at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/build
