Andrew Wilson's Blog

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Bicep File Template | VS Code Snippet

Problem Space: After developing native ARM templates for a year or two within a set structure, I have found myself applying the same structure to my Bicep templates using comments. This structure however is not setup by default, and in actuality, the sequencing of your bicep components doesn’t really matter as long as your dependencies are there. Of course we typically follow the standard pattern as shown below, but the larger the template the harder it is to see the breaks between.

Posted by Andrew Wilson on Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Azure API Management | API Mocking

Problem Space: I have been recently looking into setting up some APIs within API Management. I do not currently have any backing services to hook the API’s to and I would like to decouple development of the front end systems from the backend. Thankfully Azure API Management has provided the ability to create mocks for your API’s. In this post I will be walking through API mocking and how to achieve this within Bicep Templates for deployment.

Posted by Andrew Wilson on Sunday, September 18, 2022

Azure API Management | Purge Soft-Deleted Instance

Problem Space: Around June 2020 a change was made to Azure API Management whereby any deletion of the instance via the Azure portal, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, and REST API version 2020-06-01-preview or later will result in the instance being soft-deleted. This is to allow for recoverability of a recently deleted API Management instance, and therefore protecting against accidental deletion of the instance. The problem with this is that not all the Azure Resource Management tooling currently supports the management of soft deleted API Management Instances.

Posted by Andrew Wilson on Wednesday, September 7, 2022

Azure Logic App | Parallel Terminates & Action State Checking

Problem Space: I have recently encountered an interesting problem space with Azure logic app action run after logic. I ran into the problem whilst creating a logic app that will perform actions in parallel. The bulk of the actions are performed in scopes. If an action fails within the first set of scopes, the scope status is Failed. If the first scope fails, then the second scope full of actions are executed (this based on run after logic).

Posted by Andrew Wilson on Sunday, September 4, 2022

Azure Role Assignment

Problem Space: I recently came into some issues with assigning Azure roles through a Bicep template and pipeline deployment. I was looking to assign ‘Storage Blob Data Reader’ to a service principal, and refine their access to only the container of the storage account. The three main issues that I ran into were: What are Role Assignment Conditions and how can I use them in my template? I am trying to assign a built in role, what is the roleDefinitionId that I should be using?

Posted by Andrew Wilson on Friday, September 2, 2022