Imaginarium

Azure Functions

Connecting Azure Functions with Azure App Configuration

Assuming that you require your application that lives on an Azure compute fabric (App Service, Azure Functions, Azure Container Apps, Azure Kubernetes Service) to connect to a managed and centralised store for app settings/configs, then the Azure App Configuration service helps in this direction. The use of Microsoft Entra

Azure Relay

Cloud and On-Prem with Azure Relay Hybrid Connection

The purpose of Azure Relay Hybrid Connections is to be able to reach into our on premises application without the need to be poking holes into our firewall and leave our network infrastructure relatively untouched. It eliminates any kind of networking related complexities from our solution, reducing our overheads. The

Azure AI Search Featured

Azure AI Search RAG and Vector Search for SQL

When dealing with searching for semantic meaning through data in your apps, Azure AI Search can come to the rescue. The idea is to be able to look at a source of data and then vectorise it with the help of an Embedding model (typically from AI model providers such

Azure Resource Management

Azure batch delete empty Resource Groups

Let's say you have been working with Azure for some time and you have accumulated a number of resources across multiple resource groups. You wanted to keep things tidy back then, but now it has become messy and your Azure Resource Groups need to be cleaned up. You

AI Services on Azure Featured

Azure Container Apps with DeepSeek-R1

The DeepSeek-R1 Large Language Model can easily run on Azure Container Apps for as low compute as 3 CPU cores and 6GB of RAM for a fast experience with the 1.5billion parameter model. You can opt for more CPU and RAM if you choose. The DeepSeek-R1 model comes in

Azure Kubernetes Service

Azure Kubernetes Service KeyVault access with Dapr

An alternative method for gaining access to KeyVault secrets from applications in Azure Kubernetes Service is through the use of Dapr. Dapr will run as a sidecar in your Kubernetes cluster. Although it is lightweight and provides much simpler access, it should be noted that Dapr effectively creates additional pods

Azure Kubernetes Service Featured

Azure Kubernetes Service KeyVault access via Workload Identity

When accessing Azure Key Vault from Azure Kubernetes Service, one of the ways available to do so is through the use of a Workload Identity. A Workload Identity in Azure works by allowing the pods in your Azure Kubernetes cluster assume an existing Managed Identity so that they can gain

AI Services on Azure

Azure AI Speech Service Fast Transcription

Azure recently updated its Speech to Text service to bring what is known as Fast Transcription. It aims to improve on Speech to Text transcription turn-around as the name describes. It is currently in preview at the time of this writing through a REST endpoint and still comes with the

Azure Container Apps Featured

Azure Container Apps Dapr State Store

When attempting to connect an Azure Container App to different services in Azure with multiple containers with code, this can prove to be challenging. Dapr is suited for cases where we want to communicate between different services without needing to specifically write client-side SDK code that is tied to the

Azure Blob Storage

Using Azure Storage Actions

Azure Storage Actions help us perform large scale actions on blobs across one or more storage accounts from a singular serverless resource. Unlike needing to create an Azure Function, or the manual execution of a Powershell script or a maybe web job, the task is carried out in a way

Azure Container Apps Featured

Azure Container Apps with Ollama for general AI inference

An Azure Container Apps instance can run multiple containers under a construct of a main application container that is supported by other 'sidecar' containers. It gives us the perfect environment to create, for example, a web app that has a complimentary Small Language model inference engine in the

Azure Kubernetes Service Featured

Azure Kubernetes Service add Windows Node pool

When running an Azure Kubernetes Cluster, there might come a point where you wish to add a Windows Node pool for supporting Windows containers that you may have. For adding a Windows node pool to an Azure Kubernetes Cluster, it is a requirement that the target AKS cluster is using

Semantic Kernel

Semantic Kernel for .NET: a quick look

With Semantic Kernel, we are able to orchestrate or rig up an object that handles calls to popular API services for interacting with Large language models and Small Language Models from OpenAI, Microsoft, Mistral* and Google* (*marked for future releases according to Microsoft at Build 2024). Semantic Kernel with GPT4o

Azure App Service

Azure App Service mount to Azure Files Share

Within Azure App Service, we have the advantage of mounting onto an SMB Azure Files Share for our benefit, providing instant access to large storage that behaves like a local storage folder on our running App Service. This means that users using the Azure Files Share from machines that have

AI Services on Azure Featured

Azure AI Speech voice control with OpenAI GPT4 and SSML

SSML or Speech Synthesis Markup Language allows us to control the spoken behaviour of a synthesised voice in our application. Within Azure AI Speech, we get the ability to use SSML with the available synthetic and neural voices available from Microsoft and also the neural voices from OpenAI too(with

AI Services on Azure Featured

Azure AI Speech to Text vs OpenAI Whisper

Azure AI Speech and OpenAI's Whisper model are services that are capable of speech to text transcription not only in the cloud but at the edge too. We do not always entirely need to rely on the use of API keys that authenticate into a cloud-supported inference service

Azure Devops

Deploy IIS site with Azure Devops

Azure Devops has useful capabilities that allow you to deploy your web application for IIS to your on premises app server, VM or an Azure VM if you choose. It brings more modern deployment processes for legacy IIS applications you may have into your workflow and remove those manual steps

gRPC

gRPC API Server for .NET on Raspberry Pi

Setting up a gRPC API Server on an edge device such as a Raspberry Pi can be useful to offload compute responsibilities elsewhere, maintaining a small footprint computationally and power-wise. When scaled up, the gRPC framework compared to using REST, gives us advantages of native HTTP/2 support with more

Azure APIM Featured

Deploy Azure Self Hosted Gateway to Docker

The Azure API Management service allows you to host an API Gateway on your own infrastructure on premises without API requests going into Azure first. You might want to do so for compliance reasons, minimising request traffic into Azure itself and related costs, or simply streamlining how you operate your

Azure Service Bus

Message Pump in Azure Service Bus

Despite the assumptions that an Azure Service Bus Queue must be polled and then dequeued manually for messages in client code, there is a tiny and neat way to automatically dequeue messages as soon as they arrive. It is an alternative to setting up a Service Bus Triggered Azure Function

Azure App Service Featured

Azure WebJobs for background processing in App Service

The point of Azure WebJobs is to carry out small background tasks within the context of your Azure App Service. The main advantage is that an Azure WebJob has access to or awareness of your App Service environment (files, logs, processes etc) to do pretty much anything you would like

Azure Event Grid Featured

Azure Custom EventGrid Event Handler with WebHooks

Setting up a custom Azure EventGrid Event Handler can be done through the use of a WebHook Endpoint when defining the Subscription, enabling our local apps to react in response to EventGrid Events, whether the Events originated from resources in Azure or from completely external services by ourselves or other

Azure Static Web Apps

Authentication in Azure Static Web Apps with Oauth

Oauth authentication in Azure Static Web App is fairly easy to add in as it is built within the Azure Static Web App service itself. It is possible to add in different oauth providers such as Microsoft, Github and X (Twitter); the three I am aware of at the time

Azure APIM

Azure Cloud Resume Challenge Update: Adding Azure API Management

The Azure Cloud Resume Challenge in most cases seeks to update a visitor counter when a visitor lands on the resume holder's page. In my first iteration of the Azure Cloud Resume Challenge I wrote about here, I initially created an architecture that looks like this: As you

Azure Container Apps

Scheduled Azure Container App Job Example

Azure Container App Jobs are designed to execute for a short period of time as part of your containerised workload in an Azure Container App Environment. They exist as separate entities from your Azure Container App but live in the same Azure Container App Environment to share resources. They can