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21 posts tagged with "bicep"

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· 4 min read
John Reilly

We're currently in the gold rush period of AI. The world cannot get enough. A consequence of this, is that rationing is in force. It's like the end of the second world war, but with GPUs. This is a good thing, because it means that we can't just spin up as many resources as we like. It's a bad thing, for the exact same reason.

If you're making use of Azure's Open AI resources for your AI needs, you'll be aware that there are limits known as "quotas" in place. If you're looking to control how many resources you're using, you'll want to be able to control the capacity of your deployments. This is possible with Bicep.

This post grew out of a GitHub issue around the topic where people were bumping on the message the capacity should be null for standard deployment as they attempted to deploy. At the time that issue was raised, there was very little documentation on how to handle this. Since then, things have improved, but I thought it would be useful to have a post on the topic.

title image reading "Azure Open AI: handling capacity and quota limits with Bicep" with the Azure Open AI / Bicep logos

· 4 min read
John Reilly

Azure Container Apps supports custom domains via certificates. If you're looking to make use of the managed certificates in Azure Container Apps using Bicep, then you might want to take a look at this post on the topic.

This post will instead look at how we can use the "bring your own certificates" approach in Azure Container Apps using Bicep. Well, as much as that is possible; there appear to be limitations in what can be achieved with Bicep at the time of writing.

title image reading "Azure Container Apps, Bicep, bring your own certificates and custom domains" with the Azure Container App logos

· 6 min read
John Reilly

Azure Container Apps support managed certificates and custom domains. However, deploying them with Bicep is not straightforward - although it is possible. It seems likely there's a bug in the implementation in Azure, but I'm not sure. Either way, it's possible to deploy managed certificates and custom domains using Bicep. You just need to know how.

If, instead, you're looking to make use of the "bring your own certificates" approach in Azure Container Apps using Bicep, then you might want to take a look at this post on the topic.

I've facetiously subtitled this post "a three pipe(line) problem" because it took three Azure Pipelines to get it working. This is not Azure Pipelines specific though, it's just that I was using Azure Pipelines to deploy the Bicep. Really, this applies to any way of deploying Bicep. GitHub Actions, Azure CLI or whatever.

If you're here because you've encountered the dread message:

Creating managed certificate requires hostname '....' added as a custom hostname to a container app in environment 'caenv-appname-dev'

Then you're in the right place. I'm going to explain how to get past that error message and get your custom domain working with your Azure Container App whilst still using Bicep. It's going to get ugly. But it will work.

title image reading "Azure Container Apps, Bicep, managed certificates and custom domains" with the Azure Container App logos

· 3 min read
John Reilly

If you deploy Bicep templates to Azure in Azure DevOps, you'll likely use the dedicated Azure DevOps task; the catchily named AzureResourceManagerTemplateDeployment@3. This task has had support for deploying Bicep since early 2022. But whilst vanilla Bicep is supported, there's a use case which isn't supported; private Bicep registries.

title image reading "Private Bicep registry authentication with AzureResourceManagerTemplateDeployment@3" with the Bicep, Azure and Azure DevOps logos

· 5 min read
John Reilly

When sending a single item array to a Bicep template you may get an error like this:

ERROR: InvalidTemplate - Deployment template validation failed: 'Template parameter 'allowedIPAddresses' was provided an invalid value. Expected a value of type 'Array', but received a value of type 'String'.

This is down to the fact that Bash arrays when used with the Azure CLI can be a little surprising. If we initialise a single item array then it's not an array. It's a string. This is a bit of a pain when you're trying to pass a single item array to a Bicep template. It's possible to work around this with JSON and Bicep user defined types. Let's see how.

title image reading "Bicep user defined types and Bash single item arrays" with a Bicep logo

· 22 min read
John Reilly

This post shows how to build and deploy two Azure Container Apps using Bicep and GitHub Actions. These apps will communicate using dapr, be built in VS Code using a devcontainer. It will be possible to debug in VS Code and run with docker-compose.

This follows on from the previous post which built and deployed a simple web application to Azure Container Apps using Bicep and GitHub Actions using the GitHub container registry.

title image reading "Azure Container Apps dapr, devcontainer, debug and deploy"  with the dapr, Bicep, Azure Container Apps and GitHub Actions logos

· 14 min read
John Reilly

This post shows how to build and deploy a simple web application to Azure Container Apps using Bicep and GitHub Actions. This includes the configuration and deployment of secrets.

This post follows on from the previous post which deployed infrastructure and a "hello world" container, this time introducing the building of an image and storing it in the GitHub container registry so it can be deployed.

If you'd like to learn more about using dapr with Azure Container Apps then you might want to read this post.

title image reading "Azure Container Apps: build and deploy with Bicep and GitHub Actions" with the Bicep, Azure Container Apps and GitHub Actions logos

· 4 min read
John Reilly

Azure Container Apps are an exciting way to deploy containers to Azure. This post shows how to deploy the infrastructure for an Azure Container App to Azure using Bicep and GitHub Actions. The Azure Container App documentation features quickstarts for deploying your first container app using both the Azure Portal and the Azure CLI. These are great, but there's a gap if you prefer to deploy using Bicep and you'd like to get your CI/CD setup right from the beginning. This post aims to fill that gap.

If you're interested in building your own containers as well, it's worth looking at this follow up post.

title image reading "Azure Container Apps, Bicep and GitHub Actions" with the Bicep, Azure Container Apps and GitHub Actions logos

· 6 min read
John Reilly

Azure standard tests are a tremendous way to monitor the uptime of your services in Azure. Sometimes also called availability tests, web tests and ping tests, this post goes through how to deploy one using Bicep. It also looks at some of the gotchas that you may encounter as you're setting it up.

title image reading "Azure standard availability tests with Bicep" with a Bicep logo and Azure logos

· 9 min read
John Reilly

How can we deploy resources to Azure, and then run an integration test through them in the context of an Azure Pipeline? This post will show how to do this by permissioning our Azure Pipeline to access these resources using Azure RBAC role assignments. It will also demonstrate a dotnet test that runs in the context of the pipeline and makes use of those role assignments.

title image reading "Permissioning Azure Pipelines with Bicep and Role Assignments" and some Azure logos

· 7 min read
John Reilly

If we're provisioning resources in Azure with Bicep, we may have a need to acquire the connection strings and keys of our newly deployed infrastructure. For example, the connection strings of an event hub or the access keys of a storage account. Perhaps we'd like to use them to run an end-to-end test, perhaps we'd like to store these secrets somewhere for later consumption. This post shows how to do that using Bicep and the listKeys helper. Optionally it shows how we could consume this in Azure Pipelines.