I hope everyone has a joyful festive season with family and has more than one reason to celebrate. In the spirit of the season, We (#cloudmarathoner community) rolled our sleeves and produced two sessions for the Fesive Tech Calendar 2023 event.
The first session – “The 12 Bicep πͺ Tips of Christmas: Best Practices for Azure Deployment” is done in collaboration with Kasun Rajapakse – a Microsoft Azure MVP and a #cloudmarathoner community contributor.
In this session, we invite you to take a trip to Azure with ‘The 12 Bicep Tips of Christmas: Best Practices for Azure Deployment.’ We encourage you to open the present of knowledge as we show you the ropes and help you use Azure Bicep to its best potential. By joining us you will spread good cheer for a prosperous and trouble-free Azure experience this holiday season in honor of efficient cloud management.
This issue originated from the fact that git by default uses the “Linux” crypto backend.
However, there is a simple solution, from the beginning of version Git on Windows 2.14, you can configure Git to use SChannel. This is a built-in Windows networking layer as the crypto backend. In other words, the Windows networking layer will be used with the Windows certificate storage mechanism and you are not required to configure the curl CA storage mechanism.
Fortunately, you don’t have to change anything in your Windows environment, just run the following Git command: “git config –global http.sslbackend schannel”.
Let me know if that helped with your problem and keep me in the loop if you had a similar problem.
In this post, I will be addressing a common an error that could be seen in your GitHub actions, once in a while, called “Error: Az CLI Login failed. Please check the credentials and make sure az is installed on the runner”.
I am very glad to announce the latest stats and progress on our community repo “Awesome Azure Bicep”!
What is Awesome Azure Bicep
This is a GitHub repo that helps you to learn and discover resources that are helping you with the adoption of Azure Bicep – a new #infrastructureascode approach to manage Azure resources.
I have to postpone a couple of things at the end of 2021 due to unexpected events, and one of them was updated to my old GitHub account.
Since the beginning of 2019, there were many great additions to the GitHub community. One of the remarkable features is the ability to customize your profile.
Without any overdue, I have analyzed a couple of tips from the link above and looked into samples, and created my customized GitHub profile.
Of course, it is not perfect. I am looking to make it better over time.
Please, let me know your suggestions and feedback or share your #awesome GitHub profile with the community!
As you were informed in my last post, I have published a new GitHub repo to help the community and new learners with Azure Bicep resources. The new repo – AWESOME Azure Bicep πͺ is getting a high interest from all of you.
Thank you very much for accessing, starring β and forking π΄ it! If you learn about it now, please check it out here.
And this is not all. We have plenty of room to grow this repo with the latest contributions from you.
Two new contributors
In less than a week, we got two great contributions from Kasun Rajapakse and Luke Murray π. Thank you very much for your contributions!
Get started with Azure Bicep
Let’s step-up your game and start learning the latest π Azure #infrastructureascode language (aka, Bicep). I sincerely invite you to become a part of this really great “learn and share” initiative of Azure Bicep.
Share your interest and knowledge with the community by opening your very first GitHub PR.
Looking for a video course on Azure Bicep ?π€ >> Azure Bicep First Look πΒ https://lnkd.in/eWsxf3hjΒ is here to help!
Summary
This project is growing and let’s become a part of this Azure Bicep community !
Ready to make your first PR to Awesome Azure Bicep repo? Please check out the contribution guide or reach out if you need help in this process.
I have been getting many questions on how to start an Azure Bicep journey – in a special and AWESOME way π – which brought an idea to create the AWESOME Azure Bicep GitHub repo for the community π
Long story short, this has been on ideation for few days and is life now, as of Jan 18, 2022 ! π
Now, I have started gradually adding important official and community resources to help new #Azure learnersΒ and #cloudmarathoners!
AWESOME Azure Bicep repo
Please, share β and fork π΄ this repo and make your contributions.
I really ask you ππ to make your contributions and help maintain and grow this repo going forward.
I am very excited to see you all in the next Omaha Azure User Group meetup. This time we will speak about the latest advancements and use cases you could apply in your Azure resource authoring toolkit.
As you may know, it is that time of a year when great content will be coming to the town! You could enjoy and learn throughout the month of December, as people behind the #festivetechcalendar will be bringing you lots of new content from different communities and people around the globe.
This year, I have submitted two sessions and have been nicely surprised yesterday. Both sessions have been accepted and I am looking forward to deliver following sessions for the community:
Session # 1: What you need to know about Azure AD security defaults?
Accepted session – “What you need to know about Azure AD security defaults?“
In this session above, we will discuss about how to get started with Azure security on right foot and its challenges. We will focus on importance of a strong Identity and Access in any cloud solution that we are creating for our customers. One simple way to get started is review and adjustment of security default options in Azure AD. We will also look into the set of practices to get you started with Azure AD setup and learn about the benefits of Azure Security Benchmark.
Session # 2: All you need to know about Azure Bicep configurations
Accepted session -“All you need to know about Azure Bicep configurations”
In the second session, we will talk about Azure Bicep – a new language that aims to ease Azure resource authoring and management. This new language comes with a powerful VS Code extension and config file options. In this session, we will unveil dozens of powerful features in our config file to suit your style of coding on VS Code and cheer up our productivity skills. We will apply our fresh skills by creating several Bicep demos in the process.
Conclusion
I sincerely hope that these sessions will spark your interest and I am looking forward to see you all during this event. But most importantly, I hope you could have lots of fun during this festive month.
Stay tuned for more Azure AD, Automation & Security related posts.
It is a pretty common situation when as a Developer you are not granted access to work with company Azure AD. And there are many reasons why corporate security / IT would be hesitant to provide that access.
However, this situation should not discourage you from experimenting and prototyping solutions that you have.
Let’s consider following two easy options to create a free Azure Active Directory with Premium (P1 or P2) trial licenses. This will enable you to install/create an app that requires Azure AD license, and start testing and validating your workloads right away:
Option # 1: Microsoft 365 Developer Program
Join a free Microsoft 365 Developer Program and get a free sandbox, tools, and other resources you need to build solutions for the Microsoft 365 platform. Resources like an Azure AD with Premium licenses, pre-configured users, groups, mailboxes and etc.
Option # 2: Create an Azure trial account
Create a new free Azure AD account with a tenant and activate your Premium licenses in your new tenant. This is a classic option for anyone who is trying to learn Azure for the first time.
The Azure trial account will give you one month to play with Azure and Azure AD services, where you will get certain credits to spend on Azure resources. You will get an option to convert this trial subscription into a paid one at the end of the trial period.
How to Join Microsoft 365 Developer Program
My recommendation would be to sign up for the free Microsoft 365 developer program that gets renewed automatically, if you are using that account. Check out the following instructions on how to set-up one:
2. Sign in with a exisiting or new Microsoft Account you already have
3. On the signup page, fill the form and accept the terms and conditions of the program, and click next
4. Continue with a subscription set-up. You should specify the region where you want to create your new tenant, create a username, domain and enter a password. This step will create a new tenant and an administrator account of the tenant.
5. Enter the security information which is required to protect the sensitive administrator account. Complete this step by setting up MFA authentication for your admin account.
6. Link your developer account with your GitHub account for an easy renewal. You should see the following GitHub account link blue banner, once the linking operation succeeds.
Congratulations! You have created a new Azure AD tenant with 25 E5 user licenses. This also includes Azure AD Premium licenses.
As an additional perk, you can also add sample data packs with users, Mail & Events and SharePoint, as sample data for your development environment.
Good Luck on your next M365 project!
Stay tuned for more Azure AD, Automation & Security related posts.
Bicep – a new 
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