Imaginarium

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 like these where it allows us to achieve the communication of data between our different services without needing to specifically write

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

Azure Static Web Apps

Azure Static Web App: Cloud Resume Challenge

Azure Static Web Apps is great for hosting fast and high scale static web pages that can be used for landing pages, informational pages, posters, and general content or websites that do not require complex dynamic activity. The following is my slightly overdue implementation of the popular 'Cloud Resume

Azure Functions Featured

Azure Functions Write to Azure SQL Database (Output Binding)

Azure SQL Databases support writing from Azure Functions through Output Bindings. We define the table name and a variable pointing to a Function App Setting that has the value of the connection string as part of the SQL output binding. In this post, let's explore how we can

Azure App Service Featured

Azure App Service change Publish Model from Code to Container

With Azure App Service (Azure Web App), it is possible to modify the publishing model of the application from Code to Container after it has been published using the Azure CLI. The reason you may want to change to a Container based publishing model could be to take a step

Docker

Containerise a .NET app for Raspberry Pi

The following is a note on how I encapsulate an existing .NET 7 app for a Raspberry Pi 3b that uses a camera from a Docker container, with the use of Docker Desktop and Docker Hub. I will assume that: * you already have a Docker Hub Account, * you have Docker

Azure Devops

Azure Devops Self Hosted Agent Configuration

Azure Devops can allow you to set a machine of your choice to be the build agent of your project rather than using the default Microsoft-provided build agents. For example, in cases where you may have an extremely complex build process that you know can build on your machine with

Azure Functions

Azure Functions SQL Input Binding with Managed Identity Access

Azure Functions now have the ability to easily bind to a SQL Database for both Azure SQL Database and on premise. Previously, you would have needed to write custom code with a connection client inside the Function code itself to read and write to the database. Not anymore. We will

Azure Devops

Set Windows Service User credentials in Azure Devops

In this short post, I discuss how credentials can be set for a Windows Service's User within the Azure Devops interface, making sure the application can launch automatically with a desired User without manual intervention after the install or having to add the credentials in the code or