Randi Ratnayake

Cloud Architect | DevSecOps Evangelist | Mentor

Recent Blogs

Security Best Practices for Azure API Management (API-M)

  |   6 minute read

APIs have become the building blocks of modern software applications, enabling data and services to be shared across diverse platforms and devices. As we have been understanding in this series, Azure API Management (API-M) is there to manage our APIs. So, the security of itself and the safety of the APIs it manages are equally important. This post will explore the options available to protect our APIs and API-M out of the box and look at examples of implementing some of them.

Understanding and Designing Policies in API Management (API-M)

  |   12 minute read

Azure API Management (API-M) policies are the heart and soul of the service. It is, in fact, the most powerful feature that makes API-M stand out as an API management suite. Policies are a collection of XML and C# code snippets executed sequentially on an API’s request and response flow, controlling its access behaviour and format of the payload. In this post, we will understand more about policies and some design considerations. We will learn how to use this powerful feature to enhance and protect our backend services and how it can genuinely shine as a management layer to our APIs.

Versioning and Revisioning in API Management (API-M)

  |   10 minute read

Changes and enhancements are inevitable in any product that wants to keep up with evolving requirements. Azure API Management (API-M) offers offers robust features to facilitate this process. One of the key aspects of API Management is revisioning and versioning, which ensures that our APIs remain functional and relevant as our service evolves. In this post, we will explore the concepts of revisioning and versioning in Azure API Management, learn how to leverage these capabilities effectively and discuss some design considerations.

Designing Products in API Management (API-M)

  |   12 minute read

Azure API Management Products logically separates APIs into units to offer a subset of the APIs or different SLAs to consumers. It’s a powerful concept that makes API-M stand out to offer true enterprise-ready managed API service. So it’s important to understand the basic principles and design considerations of designing products in API-M, which this post will dive into.

Azure API Management (API-M) Overview

  |   9 minute read

Azure API Management (API-M) is a fully managed service offered by Microsoft Azure that enables organisations to create, publish, secure, and manage APIs at scale. It acts as a gateway between backend services and consumers. It provides a unified platform for API creators, administrators, and developers to collaborate and manage the entire API lifecycle efficiently. This post is first in its series that will examine how Azure API-M fits in the iPaaS architecture and several key features it offers to API developers and consumers.

Structuring Maintainable Bicep Code: A Comprehensive Guide

  |   7 minute read

Bicep is a Domain Specific Language (DSL) that defines and uses to deploy Azure resources. It provides a declarative way to express infrastructure as code (IaC) and enables you to define, manage effectively, and version your Azure deployments. It is crucial to structure your code properly for a maintainable and scalable Bicep project. This blog post will explore the best practices and guidelines I followed for structuring the Bicep codebase.

Deploy Single Tenant (Standard) Azure Logic Apps via Azure DevOps CI/CD

  |   6 minute read

Standard Logic Apps are suitable when it demands better isolation, performance and control over the executing environment. Unlike Logic App per workflow in the consumption model, Standard Logic App can host unlimited workflows. Further, the Standard Logic Apps model separates the concerns of deploying infrastructure and workflows into two different flows. This blog will give an overview to understand What LogicApps are, what flavours it offers and step through package and deployment steps using Azure DevOps pipelines.

Using Azure DevOps to Automate Deploying a Single Page App (SPA) to Azure Storage

  |   6 minute read

Azure provides a cost-effective way to host and deliver single-page applications and static websites. Whether you use modern JavaScript frameworks like React, Angular, Vue, or similar or basic HTML pages where you don’t need server-side processing to deliver your pages, Azure Storage account provides serving these static content as a scalable and reliable solution much cheaper compared to other options available. In this blog, we explore how we automate the deployment of such a website into an Azure storage account.

Set Bicep Output Variables as DevOps Pipeline Variables

  |   5 minute read

When automating infrastructure deployments in Azure DevOps using pipelines, we often face the challenge of extracting the values calculated within the infrastructure scripts in follow-up tasks. This post looks into how Bicep output variables can be accessed as Azure DevOps pipeline variables so that follow-up tasks can use those values to perform the utterly automated deployment.

Tagging Azure Resources in Bicep - The Clean Way

  |   2 minute read

Azure allows organisations an efficient way to classify Azure resources using tags. Azure tags are key-value pairs defined by users to manage and organise Azure resources for monitoring, billing and automation purposes. In this post, we look at how we do this effectively and cleanly using Azure Bicep and its native capabilities.

Defining an Effective Azure Tagging Strategy

  |   6 minute read

The ability to tag Azure resources significantly enhance resource management, cost allocation, and operational visibility. But like everything else, tagging also needs to be thought through and well-defined to ensure we find a balance to use it wisely. In this blog post, we will walk through the steps to define an effective Azure tagging strategy that aligns with the organisation’s needs and optimises resource management within the Azure environment.

Retrieve Azure Subscription ID as DevOps Pipeline Variable

  |   2 minute read

When dealing with the Azure DevOps pipeline, we may have situations where we need to extract the current Azure subscription ID and use it as a variable in follow-up pipeline tasks. There are two ways of achieving this. One is storing the Azure subscription ID as a pipeline variable in a configurable place. Certainly nothing wrong with that. But we make the assumption we know it ahead of time.

The first commit - Project Structure

  |   8 minute read

It is undoubtedly one of the first questions I asked when I was a junior developer, and it is still a question from my team on a kick-off of a new project. How do we structure and set up our source code? What folder structure makes more sense? Is there a standard? Who decides the format and such standards? Let’s deep dive into this post to understand an ideal project folder structure.

Securing Azure resources using managed identity

  |   4 minute read

Security is the primary concern in any application, especially cloud resources, when you don’t manage your infrastructure. Maintaining secrets, credentials, and permissions to secure communication of various application components is always a challenge. In this post, we deep dive into understanding what is a managed identity and particularly how to create and assign them to our Azure resources to establish secure communication.

Hello World

  |   3 minute read

If you are a developer like me, it is not unusual what a “Hello World” means. It is the simplest fundamental way of ensuring your program or code is working in a new language. In a way, it’s your first step towards the incredible journey ahead.