Technology for the Glory of God
I recently had the privilege of opening the New Zealand GitHub User Group with a presentation on using Azure Container Apps for self-hosted GitHub Actions Runners. The recording of the session is available on YouTube.
In May 2024 Microsoft released the Public Preview of the new Flex Consumption Azure Functions. This is an exciting release, primarily because it finally allows a consumption Function App to be VNet integrated. Before the release of Flex Consumption Function Apps, we had to either decide to use a consumption plan or allow access to internal resources (and pay 24/7 for the privilege). While there have been workarounds (e.g. run a Function App in Container Apps) none were ideal.
Have you ever had one of those days where your troubleshooting resembles doing the foxtrot? Forward. Sideways. Backwards. Round in Circles. I had one of those last week. My current customer is using Ansible for orchestration. As part of proving out the capabilities, and working through the best way to make it all work, I needed to set up my local environment. Running macOS typically makes setup a breeze. Thanks to the wonderful Homebrew Pacakge Manager.
Microsoft have make controlling routing within a Virtual WAN much easier thanks to a combination of Routing Intent and Route Maps (in preview at time of writing). Route Maps work in the same manner (at least theoretically) to route map configuratons network administrators are used to in on-premises equipment. In testing tehm out for a customer, I ran straight into a problem. I like to keep things tidy, and when I looked at the output of the outbound route map configuration for a site to site VPN with AWS, I didn’t like that it showed all my AWS routes being published back out to the VPN.
One challenge we often run into when provisioning Azure AD applications with Terraform is a need to grant admin consent for API permissions. Sadly there is not a native resource within Terraform to make this happen, however with some creative use of provisioners (yes, I feel bad about it too) we can ensure that admin consent is granted for our applications. To start with, we deploy our Azure AD application as normal.
In a recent project we used GitHub Actions to deploy our Terraform code. While not the best way to deploy Terraform, we had it working nicely. One of the biggest challenges we encountered was how to download the private Terraform modules we had created. In a GitHub Actions workflow you can specify the permissions that the runner should be granted. However, these permissions are scoped to the repository that the Action is running on, and it is not possible to add additonal repos to the permission set.
In my current role, I configured Terraform to manage our GitHub organisation. As with all providers, we need need to provide credentials for authentication. I didn’t want to use an access token, as they are tied to an individual user and will cause breakage should the user depart the organisation. Thankfully, GitHub supports using an application for authentication. Create the GitHub Application The first step in the process is to create a new GitHub application.