Access Azure PAAS without internet access

In some Azure environments the organization limits the outbound internet traffic from their servers. There are scenarios where you need to access Azure PAAS services (blob storage, or Azure SQL database etc.). You have to block the access to the internet and enable access to the Azure IP ranges Microsoft reserved for a specific Azure datacenter. To be able to access the service I made a script that will generate the Network Security Groep Rules in ARM format to give access to Azure services.

Creating a T-shirt size ARM template

A good way of keeping on top of the configurations deployed in your Azure environment can be done by using T-shirt size configurations. T-shirt Sizes are known working configurations for your ARM templates. By using a T-shirt Size you can take away the complexity from the ARM template consumers. A sample of a T-shirt Size can be a Small, Medium of Large offering from a resource.

In this blogpost I want to show how you can use T-shirt Size configuration in an ARM template. The idea is to deploy a website where you hide all the size setting behind a Small, Medium of Large sizing. The consumer only has two parameters to start the deployment:

Getting started with Terraform on Windows and Azure

When reviewing possible for creating declarative infrastructure, I looked at Terraform. In this blog post I show how easy it is to get started and create AzureRM resources with Terraform.