Azure

Recently I took some time to revisit Azure Cache for Redis I got first introduced to the service in 2018 and a lot has changed since then. I won’t go into detail about Redis and what it is or What is caching. But instead, I want to share my thoughts on using it on the Azure platform.

A particular use benefit of using Azure Cache for Redis instead of the self-hosting version for data cache needs is it will allow a business to bring the frequently called data to the cloud so that the data can be called faster with higher availability. This is perfect for situations where you have a frequently queried data source stored within a private network with high latency and an even higher constraint on memory usage from on-prem servers.

A little disclaimer here, these are notes from a live demo on 4-28-22 sorry if this doesn’t make sense later.

Overview:

Azure Terrafy is a new tool currently in preview as of April 27th from Microsoft designed to help you export Azure Resources listed within the AzureRM provider to a terraform main.tf file and maintain a state file.

How To Install It:

1. To be able to install Terrafy you’ll need to download the binary from the github repo. If you haven’t installed terrform you’ll want to do that as well. Click here for details

Back in July fellow Azure blogger Billy York wrote a blog post about Monitoring SSL certificates with Azure monitor utilizing a standard test within App Insights, it’s really cool that Azure finally added this ability. I want to talk about an alternative less known method using Azure Key Vault certificate contacts and lifetime contacts.

What is Azure Key Vault?

For those who are unfamiliar with The Azure service Azure Key Vault the fastest way to sum it up is that its a cloud service on Azure used for storing sensitive application information like tokens, passwords, API keys as well as TLS and SSL certificates used by resources on Azure or accessing Azure resources. The benefit of using a service like this is it will greatly reduce the risk of secrets being leaked accidentally. If you would like a more comprehensive overview of the service go to the Azure Key Vault website.