Keeping secrets secure when using API Clients
When using some API Clients (like REST Client or the HTTP Client of JetBrains' IDEs), environment variables are stored in JSON files that can contain secrets. To share these files within a team, developers tend to send them by email or by messaging applications, which is not very convenient nor secure 🔐. I thought it would be a good idea to store these secrets directly in an Azure Key Vault and automate the generation of a JSON file containing the secrets using Azure CLI and Nushell.
Pulumi with an Azure Blob Storage backend
By default when you use Pulumi, the state is managed by Pulumi Service which is very convenient as you can concentrate on building your project infrastructure instead of spending time on where to store the state and how to handle concurrency. However, sometimes for governance or pricing concerns, or any other reasons, you don't want to use Pulumi Service and you prefer to manage the state yourself with your own backend. In this article, we will see how we can do that using Azure.
ASP.NET Core - Lost in configuration
Have you ever felt a bit overwhelmed by the configuration in a project, not knowing where to look for the settings between the command line parameters, the environment variables, the configuration files in code, the configuration in Azure, ... ? When developing an ASP.NET Core application there are many places where you can put your configuration which makes it difficult to know where you should put it. Even if the official documentation about configuration in ASP.NET Core is very complete and well written, it only describes what you can use and how to use it, not what you should use and when. In this article, I will try to answer these questions and give you my opinion about how we should use configuration providers in ASP.NET Core.
You almost no longer need Key Vault references for Azure Functions.
The possibility to add configuration sources in Azure Functions has just been released with the latest version of Microsoft.Azure.Functions.Extensions NuGet package. I have been waiting for this feature for a long time (like many people I think) because it brings to Azure Functions all the things we are used to with configuration in ASP.NET Core 😻. But that is not the only reason, it is also because with this feature you almost don't need to use key vault references!