Microsoft® Azure® recently went GA with their Azure Kubernetes Service, but following the Microsoft documentation for setting up an HTTPS ingress controller could make you go in circles. Let me share what I have found out Microsoft’s recent changes in their HTTPS ingress controller document.

Azure provides backup and restore functionality when using a Standard or Premium App Service plan. That leaves web apps using a Basic App Service plan without a backup solution. In a perfect world, you would have everything in source control and deploy to get back up and running, but we do not live in a perfect world. Let’s examine the Azure App Service KUDU API to learn how to build our own backup and restore solution.

Azure provided the functionality to host static websites from an Azure Storage Account, but it did not support setting a default document. This functionality is in preview and should hit public preview this month. Let’s take a look on how to test out this great feature.

As more web application workloads move to the cloud, organizations need to be concerned about attacks from the internet. External threats are scanning public IP ranges to find known vulnerabilities and exploit businesses. Let’s take a look at the Azure Application Gateway (WAF), and see how it can be a part of our toolset for protecting our web applications.

Azure SQL is Microsoft’s answer to Platform as a Service for SQL Server. It extracts a lot of the day to day administrative tasks of managing an installation. Let’s take a look how a consumer of Azure SQL can export data to restore to a local on-premise installation.

With Azure App Service, backing up your web app is available depending which App Service plan is choosen. With the introduction of larger applications moving to the cloud, certain files or folders do not need backed up. This is not something an end user can do in the Azure portal, so let’s investigate how we can accomplish filtering of files or folders during the backup process.

You may have found the extensions tab when browsing in an Azure Web App. Selecting extensions to add to an application is as easy as just pointing and clicking. Moving outside of the portal to an ARM template, things get a little bit tricky because documentation is lacking.

If you are using Microsoft® Azure® Blob Storage and have a heavy workload, here’s something you can do to improve performance that the majority of people are not doing - pay attention to the name you use for an Azure storage account.

Sitecore has the option of making use of TempDB in Sql Server to speed up your session state operations. What catches people off guard is the fact that tempdb is recreated at service restart of SQL Server. This becomes a problem when you have to recreate the table structure and user permissions inside tempdb.

Using the Azure diagnostic extension lets you capture a good set of metrics to help trend and diagnose your virtual machine. What a lot of people don’t know is that you can configure it to capture custom log files.