What’s the best IaC tool for Azure?

Many of you will already be using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) day to day but for some choosing the right tool to ensure success is the real first stumbling block. So with so many options, how should you go about choosing the one that’s right? In the Microsoft corner there’s; PowerShell, Azure Resource Manager (ARM), Bicep and in the 3rd party corner HashiCorp Terraform each offer benefits and drawbacks. The choice comes down to your team’s skills, the complexity of your environment, and your cloud strategy. Continue reading

The Importance of Using Web Application Firewalls in Azure

As businesses continue to shift their operations to the cloud, it’s important to ensure that their applications and data are protected from threats such as cyber attacks and data breaches. One way to do this is by implementing a web application firewall (WAF) on an application gateway in Azure. A WAF is a security solution that sits between a website or web application and the internet, and is designed to protect against common web-based attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and parameter tampering. Continue reading

Azure Sentinel - Log4J

Intro Apache Log4j is a Java-based logging utility that has recently had a zero-day exploit released codenamed “Log4Shell” (CVE-2021-44228). This zero-day allows an attacker to execute code on the remote server (Remote Code Execution) and can allow an attacker the ability to fully compromise the server the service is running on. Why is this a problem? The log4J package uses a JNDILookup plugin to allow the application/service to search for data throughout a Java directory and is found on all platforms running Java+logging from version 2. Continue reading

Why Terraform?

Intro I’m often asked if Microsoft provides the ability the deploy resources into Azure using Azure Resource Manager templates (ARM Templates) then why would I use Terraform for CI/CD deployments? In this post, I’ll try to answer this and provide an understanding of the differences and why, in my opinion, Terraform is the most versatile and agile tool available for IaC deployments. Why Infrastructure as code? Anyone who’s spent anytime deploying to Azure knows that the user interface is intuitive and that it guides you through the creation of deploying resources really well, prompting you for missing information and providing handy tooltips. Continue reading

Create enterprise applications for external access using Terraform

3rd party services such as threat management tools for Azure can add incredible value but to access services, they need a secure way of connecting to the platform. Enterprise Application give full IAM (Identity and Access Management) control and can be used to provide granular access to services. During deployment I found a need to automate the following elements: Registration of application within Azure with customized API permissions Creation of Enterprise application (Service Principal) linked to application Creation of client secret with no expiry date Creation of custom RBAC Assign app to subscriptions using custom RBAC role To make sure this process was repeatable easily and at scale the following Terraform elements were used. Continue reading