Azure Bicep Snapshots – Test and Validate Your Code and Deployments

Azure Bicep Snapshots is a new preview feature introduced in v0.36.1 release. The feature allows you to generate the definition of a resource as it appears in ARM or in the Azure Portal for that particular resource when you click on the JSON view option, producing a JSON file as the result. Once you have that JSON file you can execute the snapshot command again to get results in what-if format. All this is done locally without doing an actual deployment against Azure. This means you can see how changes either in code or in the input impact your end results without having to deploy resources or make sure any referenced resources exist. This blog post will focus on showing you the capabilities of Bicep Snapshots in a complex real-world module and its bicep parameters configuration.

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Deploying A2A API in API Management with Azure Bicep

After introducing MCP servers. within Azure API Management and me blogging about it, now we have A2A API support. This makes APIM a very good choice for protecting, accelerating and observing your AI apps. Obviously I was tempted to find out how this new API type can be deployed via Bicep as proper documentation is lacking.

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Azure Policy Little Secrets

Azure Policy checks Azure resources and operations by matching their properties against defined business rules. It helps to enforce organizational standards and to assess compliance at-scale. Azure Policy is commonly used to enforce governance across Azure, ensuring consistency, regulatory compliance, security controls, cost management, and operational standards. Unfortunately, Azure Policy has its secrets; it has some limitations that are either not documented or the documentation is not so easy to find. With this blog post, I am not trying to bash on Azure Policy as I love the service and I think its architecture is very good, but due to the way some Azure APIs are written it can limit what Azure Policy can do.

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Do not use Azure Front Door metric OriginHealthPercentage in Log Analytics

Azure Front Door is a global, scalable service that acts as a content delivery network (CDN) and application load balancer to improve application performance and availability. The way you expose application on Azure FD is by creating origins. For each origin you have to add one or more origins. When configuring the origin you have the option to configure health probe. The health probe makes sure the origins are up. If an origin is not up it will traffic will not be sent to it. The results from the health probes is visible via OriginHealthPercentage metric. Now let’s have a closer look to metric OriginHealthPercentage as the results from it might be a little bit confusing, especially when you send the metric to Log Analytics workspace and viewed there.

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List Keys for Azure Managed Redis with Bicep

Recently Azure has announced retirement of Azure Cache for Redis and Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise. This of course leads folks to look at Azure Managed Redis. Note that underneath Azure Cache for Redis and Azure Managed Redis use the same resource type but with different SKUs. Overall my general impression is that not many existing customers have moved from Azure Cache for Redis to Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise. The integration with Redis to other services and applications in most cases happen via providing connection string with credentials. It is well known how to list the credentials from Azure Cache for Redis with Bicep but may be it is not so known with how to do that with Azure Managed Redis due its different Azure architecture.

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