Classic Azure deployments often leave behind orphaned role assignments, creating clutter and confusion. In this post, I explore how Deployment Stacks—tested via GitHub Actions—offer a cleaner, more predictable way to manage and remove role assignments at the subscription level. Includes code, setup insights, and lessons learned.

A practical guide to automating Azure DevOps Work Item updates using Python and Azure Pipelines. This post explores hosting options, AI-assisted coding, and the trade-offs of different authentication methods. It highlights a lightweight, maintainable solution for personal productivity and reflects on the evolving role of developers in an AI-driven workflow.

Learn how to leverage Azure CLI for automating tasks and managing API tokens. This guide covers using DefaultAzureCredential for seamless authentication without secrets, managing Microsoft Graph permissions, and generating Bearer tokens for custom APIs. Explore examples for refreshing tokens, accessing Azure DevOps API, and more. Perfect for developers aiming to streamline workflows and enhance automation with Azure CLI.

Find out how you can scope your app’s access to a subset of users, e.g. Guest Users, to improve security

Recently I Became Curious About Discord Bots and How They Work.

In this blog post, I am going to write about my learnings. While some parts might be familiar to you, I found it very amusing to start with a simple “Hello, World!” bot, run it locally, deploy it to the cloud, and integrate it with ChatGPT. Along the way, I learned a lot. I hope this post can inspire other people or at least serve as a reference to refresh my memory when I revisit this topic in the future.

Recently my role assignments in Azure AD were switched from permanent to eligible ones. This is part of PIM - Privileged Identity Management, you can read more about it on MS Docs:

• Start using Privileged Identity Management

To activate your eligible assignment you can use Azure Portal, Graph API, and PowerShell. The activation in the portal and Graph API is described on MS Docs:

• Activate my Azure AD roles in PIM

The new permission in Graph API - Sites.Selected - is a step in the right direction. Since long we have been looking for ways of scoping the accesses to live up to the least privilege principle. It was either nothing or everything. I have tried out the new Sites.Selected permission and here are my findings.

First of all, if you haven’t heard about Sites.Selected, please visit these pages to find out more. I am skipping the introduction, since there are already good resources on that out there.

Have you also got some old huge scripts that run on a server locally? Have you also considered moving them to the cloud? Here comes an idea of how to do it quickly and easy.

In my case I have some older powershell scripts that are harder to convert to serverless applications:

• They use MSOnline module in PowerShell, hence they require rewriting to AzureAD before using them in an Azure Function
• They take around 15 minutes to complete, Azure Functions Consumption Plan is limited to 10 minutes. Of course I can split them in several parts, but I am looking for an easy way right now, I have to postpone refactoring because I am not sure if there is a real need for this script solution.
• They process a lot of data and consume more that 400 MB memory which makes it crash when I put it in a Azure Automation Runbook.

Well, maybe a Windows Server VM in Azure is the only way? While recently setting up a minecraft server and following a blog post that proposes auto shutdown and logic apps to start the server, I came up with an idea to use exactly the same approach to make it as cost effective as possible.

What if you put together Work From Home and Home Automation? Well, removing the common denominator (HOME) would mean Work Automation (sic!). I want to tell you about a tiny hobby project I have had at home, still related to work of mine: Whenever an Azure alert is triggered, my Trådfri smart light from IKEA flashes for a couple of seconds.

Summary (if you want to skip the long story below): The solution is a tiny web application. The publicly accessible url, exposed using ngrok, is registered as a webhook in an Azure Alert. It’s on Github, you’re welcome to use it as you please 😎:

Azure Alerts are awesome for monitoring of solutions in Azure. If you are about to set up your first Alert Rules in Azure, then it’s a guide for you. Configuring alert rules can be quite intimidating at first, with all the options, metrics, evaluation times, etc.

Here is a very very simple setup that can serve as a teaser and help you get started with the Azure Alerts.