Christos Polydorou

When creating resources on Azure, there are times that the deployment fails due to the name selected for the resource. This is primarily due to the fact that there are some resources that are available as services and exposed to the internet, thus their name should be unique across deployments.  Take a storage account for example. The name should not only be unique but also in lowercase and under 25 characters! A virtual machine, on the other hand, does not require a unique name (at a global level). How do we tackle such requirements? The Bicep uniqueString function is here to help. This particular function takes a number of string parameters and creates a unique string. Combined with scope functions like subscription and resourceGroup , you may generate strings unique to your environment. Other string functions like toLower  and substring  can be used to make your code even more robust. Let's dive into some examples! The below code is part of a bicep file that deploys ...

I've been using Azure to test virtual machines and applications for quite a few years now and I've realized that although I mostly use two or three solution templates - like an Active Directory environment for example - in the majority of the cases I need more server or client machines. This is the main reason I decided to adjust my deployments and include loops so that I can control the number of machines using parameters and variables. In this post, I'll describe how I've used loops and hopefully how you can benefit from them. I'm a big fan of organizing resources in modules, so all of the examples will be based on a deployment of virtual networks and virtual machines from a main bicep file using the respective modules, one for each resource type. Multiple Resources/Modules Since we're talking about modules, what could be better than having the ability to deploy the same module multiple times! The first thing we need is a variable that will hold the custom fie...

Developing using containers offers the ability to use different environments and software without having to install them on your development workstation, while at the same time you conserve a lot of system resources avoiding the use of virtual machines. Visual Studio Code has been receiving a lot of functionality towards that end with a great deal of extensions and part of that is targeting Azure template developement.  We can use VS Code to develop our code and then use a container with all the Azure tools to deploy. This post describes this very process, from docker installation to VS Code configuration and finally template deployment.  First we need to install all the necessary components on our system. This includes Docker Desktop, Visual Studio Code and a patch for the linux kernel of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2). You can find Docker Desktop on the official Docker page here  and VS Code on its page over here . The Docker installation wizard will add any requir...