When Software Attacks!

Microsoft Copilot in Azure - Review

Reviewing David Rendón and Steve Miles’ book Microsoft Copliot in Azure: AI-powered cloud automation and optimization

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, January 3, 2026

Azure for Developers - Review

Reviewing Kamil Mrzygłód’s book Azure for Developers

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, January 1, 2026

The Azure Cloud Native Architecture Mapbook - Review

Reviewing Stéphane Eyskens book The Azure Cloud Native Architecture Mapbook

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, December 8, 2025

Using PagerDuty Orchestration with Azure Alerts

Configuring Azure alert action groups with the PagerDuty v2 api

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, March 22, 2025

Configuring diagnostic settings for Azure services using bicep

If you’re hosting your application infrastructure in Azure and consolidate the diagnostic and audit information from your services into Log Analytics or elsewhere, it’s pretty easy to do using Bicep. It’s not very well documented, however, which is the reason for this post.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, May 17, 2024

Deploying an Azure Container App Environment within a virtual network using bicep

When working on a project recently I needed to deploy a Container App Environment within a virtual network in Azure. Thanks to the joys of internet search, I started off reading the wrong bits of the official documention and got incredibly confused, and much of the community content about this uses out of date schemas and code. This article is so I don’t need to go through that again, and hopefully it will help others, too.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, May 17, 2024

Using bicep to define Service Bus scaling rules for Azure Container Apps

I recently needed to set KEDA scaling rules on an Azure Container app that used the number of messages in a Service Bus queue. There’s plenty of info out there on the internet about scaling rules, but not when it comes to Service Bus, so I’m writing up what I learned here.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, May 17, 2024

Importing bicep lint output as test results in Azure DevOps pipelines

Bicep is a great improvement over ARM Templates but doesn’t remove the need to validate our code at build time. I could continue to use the ARM-TTK and validate the generated template, but bicep has it’s own built in rules. Getting build errors in a way that can provide meaningful information in my CI/CD tooling is an interesting challenge.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, February 5, 2024

Define Once, Deploy Everywhere (Sort of...)

Using Lability, DSC and ARM to define and deploy multi-VM environments Configuration as code crops up a lot in conversation these days. We are searching for that DevOps Nirvana of a single definition of our environment that we can deploy anywhere. The solution adopted at Black Marble by myself and my colleagues is not quite that, but it comes close enough to satisfy our needs. This document details the technologies and techniques we adopted to achieve our goal, which sounds simple, right?

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, March 2, 2017

Creating Website Slots and SQL Elastic Pools using Azure Resource Templates

Recently I have been helping a number of organisations automate the deployment of their applications to Azure and came across a couple of scenarios that were not documented: Deploying an App Services web site with slots and SQL connection string settings, and the creation of a SQL Elastic Pool. Of those, the SQL Elastic Pool I found to be written up already by Vincent-Philipe Lauzon and all credit to him - my template draws on his excellent article.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, January 18, 2017