This post shows how to add an AI assistant plugin to Backstage that lets internal developers chat with their own domain data using Azure AI Foundry Agents. We cover agent concepts, minimal API usage, plugin structure (frontend + lightweight backend proxy), security (secrets & identity), and deployment guidance. 1. Why an AI Chat Plugin in… Continue reading Building Backstage AI Chat Plugin with Azure AI Foundry Agents
Category: Identity
Backstage on Azure Container Apps with Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) Authentication
End-to-end guide: containerizing Backstage, provisioning Azure resources (with Bicep & CLI), enabling Microsoft Entra (formerly Azure AD) sign-in, managing secrets, scaling, observing, troubleshooting, and cleaning up — all aligned with current Azure best practices (managed identities, least privilege, and no hard‑coded secrets). Why Backstage + Azure Container Apps Backstage centralizes your internal developer portal (catalog,… Continue reading Backstage on Azure Container Apps with Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) Authentication
Azure Communication Service with Managed Identity
Background A few months ago, I have written a Demo application that shows how to send email and SMS via Azure Communication Service. The code was written in Spring Boot (Java) and hosted on Azure Container Apps. During the demo, I have used Connection strings of Azure Communication Service which is not ideal for production… Continue reading Azure Communication Service with Managed Identity
GitOps for AKS with Azure Blob Storage (Flux v2)
GitOps is a modern way of managing infrastructure and applications using Git as a single source of truth. Flux v2 is a Kubernetes-native GitOps toolkit that automates the deployment and lifecycle management of applications in Kubernetes clusters. In this blog post, we will show you how to use GitOps with Flux v2 on Azure Kubernetes… Continue reading GitOps for AKS with Azure Blob Storage (Flux v2)
Demystifying Azure Container Apps & Dapr – Part 2
Part 1 of this article is here. Last time, I created an empty Azure Container Apps Environment using Bicep. I also created some required components like Key vaults, Log analytics workspace, Application Insights and Computer vision. Application Architecture Today I want to make progress on that. As I have briefly explained before, I want to… Continue reading Demystifying Azure Container Apps & Dapr – Part 2
Demystifying Azure Container Apps & Dapr – Part 1
I have played with Dapr on Kubernetes (AKS to be specific) before and loved it for its ability to simplify distributed applications development with out of the box binding, service to service communications, secret abstractions, actors and observabilities. I have previously worked with LinkerD and Istio as service mesh and ran workload in production, but… Continue reading Demystifying Azure Container Apps & Dapr – Part 1
Folder structure for Azure DevOps repositories
Recently I was helping an enterprise where they have large number of repositories in Azure DevOps projects and wanted to have a folder hierarchies to ease the navigation. Azure pipelines have folder structures but there is no feature at this point to organize repositories into folders. There is a open feature request about it already.… Continue reading Folder structure for Azure DevOps repositories
Multi-Tenant Daemons with Microsoft Identity platform
Background I have recently speaking to a customer about the following scenario. Customer has an API that supposed to be consumed by some **trusted** daemon applications built and managed by their partners. It's not the interactive users (no signed in users via an web application) who will be using the API, rather some background process… Continue reading Multi-Tenant Daemons with Microsoft Identity platform
Secure your pipelines by frequently rotating secrets
TL; DR: This article and accompanying source codes helps you setting up an automated secret or certificate rotations for Azure service principals and Azure DevOps service connections. Jump into the technical part here. Background If you are deploying applications on Azure from Azure DevOps service connections (or GitHub actions) you are most likely using a… Continue reading Secure your pipelines by frequently rotating secrets
How to use ADFS/SAML2.0 as Identity provider with Azure AD B2C
Azure Active Directory B2C (Azure AD B2C) provides support for the SAML 2.0 identity provider. With this capability, you can create a technical profile in Azure AD B2C to federate with SAML-based identity provider, such as ADFS. Thus, allow users to sign in with their existing enterprise identities. Microsoft has good docs on this topic,… Continue reading How to use ADFS/SAML2.0 as Identity provider with Azure AD B2C