Michael S. Collier

A few months ago one of the greatest scandals to hit Azure Functions erupted . . . ASCIIartgate!

#teamAsciiArt became a trending topic on Twitter. Maybe.

The Big Deal

In an effort to reduce the verbosity of logging output by func start in the Azure Functions Core Tools, the decision was made to remove the famed ASCII art. To be fair, running func start did output quite a bit of logs. The ASCII art version of the Azure Functions logo was just one of those logs. It just happened to be the most famous of those logs. The logo was the thing of highly coveted t-shirts!

Earlier this year I wrote a post showing how to set up private site access for Azure Functions. To briefly recap, private site access refers to setting up a virtual network service endpoint to restrict HTTP-based access to the function to be only traffic from the designated virtual network (i.e. inbound HTTP requests). Attempts to access the public endpoint (e.g., https://contoso.azurewebsites.net) result in an HTTP 403 Forbidden message. Service endpoints are great, but they are not without some drawbacks (use a public IP address, doesn’t work with connections from on-premises resources (i.e. ExpressRoute), limited RBAC features, etc.)

I’ve moved my blog again! Well, sort of. Not a new engine this time. I’ve moved to a new host!

I’ve moved my blog to Azure Static Web Apps. The docs for Static Web Apps (SWA) include a good tutorial on using Hugo with SWA. I followed that tutorial.

Once I got the content set up and GitHub action publishing working, it was time to set up the custom domain name. Again, the Microsoft docs help there too. I was able to follow the instructions for setting up a custom domain with SWA, and then Burke Holland’s post on using CloudFlare for setting up a root domain.

As enterprises continue to adopt serverless (and Platform-as-a-Service, or PaaS) solutions, they often need a way to integrate with existing resources on a virtual network. These existing resources could be databases, file storage, message queues or event streams, or REST APIs. In doing so, those interactions need to take place within the virtual network. Until relatively recently, combining serverless/PaaS offerings with traditional network access restrictions was complex, if not nearly impossible.

Earlier this year I moved my blog to Jekyll. It was fun while it lasted. I’ve decided to give Hugo a try. The main reason is that I wanted something I could easily from either my Windows or Mac machines. I didn’t want to mess with installing or configuring Ruby gems.

I’m giving Hugo a try. I expect to change the theme and make tweaks over the coming weeks.