CloudOven – Terraform at ease!

TL;DR:

URL: CloudOven
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Google Chrome please! (I’ve not tested on other browsers yet)

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Background

In recent years I have spent fair amount of time in design and implementation of Infrastructure as code in larger enterprise context. Terraform seemed to be a tool of choice when it comes to preserve the uniformity in Infrastructure as code targeting multiple cloud providers. It is rapidly becoming a de facto choice for creating and managing cloud infrastructures by writing declarative definitions. It’s popular because the syntax of its files is quite readable and because it supports several cloud providers while making no attempt to provide an artificial abstraction across those providers. The active community will add support for the latest features from most cloud providers.

However, rolling out Terraform in many enterprises has its own barrier to face. Albeit the syntax (HCL) is neat, but not every developers or Infrastructure operators in organizations finds it easy. There’s a learning curve and often many of us lose momentum discovering the learning effort. I believe if we could make the initial ramp-up easier more people would play with it.

That’s one of my motivation for this post, following is the other one.

Blazor meets Terraform

Lately I was learning Blazor – the new client-side technology from Microsoft. Like many others, I find one effective way learning a new technology by creating/building solution to a problem. I have decided to build a user interface that will help creating terraform scripts easier. I will share my journey in this post.

Resource Discovery in Terraform Providers

Terraform is powerful for its providers. You will find Terraform providers for all major cloud providers (Azure, AWS, Google etc.). The providers then allow us to define “resource” and “data source” in Terraform scripts. These resource and data source have arguments and attributes that one must know while creating terraform files. Luckily, they are documented nicely in Terraform site. However, it still requires us to jump back and forth to the documentation site and terraform file editor (i.e. VSCode).

Azure-Discovery

To make this experience easier, I wrote a crawler application that downloads the terraform providers (I am doing it for Azure, AWS and google for now) and discovers the attributes and arguments for each and every resource and data source. I also try to extract the documentation for every attributes and arguments from the terraform documentation site with a layman parsing (not 100% accurate but works for majority. Something I will improve soon).

GoogleAWS-discovery

This process generates JSON structure for each resource and data source, enriches them with the documentation and stores them in an Azure Blob Storage.

Building Infrastructure as code

Now that I have a structured data store with all resources and data sources for any terraform provider, I can leverage that building a user interface on top of it. To keep things a bit organized, I started with a concept of “project”.

Project

I can start by creating a project (well, it can be a product too, but let’s not get to that debate). Project is merely a logical boundary here.

Blueprint

Within a project I can create Blueprint(s). Blueprint(s) are the entity that retains the elements of the infrastructure that we are aiming to create. For instance, a Blueprint targets to a Cloud provider (i.e. Azure). Then I can create the elements (resource and data sources) within the blueprint (i.e. Azure Web App, Cosmos DB etc.).

provider-configuration

Blueprints keeps the base structure of all the infrastructure elements. It allows defining variables (plain and simple terraform variables) so the actual values can vary in different environments (dev, test, pre-production, production etc.).

Once I am happy with the blueprint, I can download them as a zip – that contains the terraform scripts (main.tf and variable.tf). That’s it, we have our infrastructure as code in Terraform. I can execute them on a local development machine or check them in to source control – whatever I prefer.

storage_account

One can stop here and keep using the blueprint feature to generate Infrastructure as code. That’s what it is for. However, the next features are just to make the overall experience of running terraform a bit easier.

Environments

Next to blueprint, we can create as many environments we want. Again, just a logical entity to keep isolation of actual deployment for different environments.

Deployments

Deployment entity is the glue that ties a blueprint to a specific environment. For instance, I can define a blueprint for “order management” service (or micro-service maybe?), create an environment as “test” and then create a “deployment” for “order management” on “test”. This is where I can define constant values to the blueprint variable that are specific to the test environment.

Terraform State

Perhaps the most important aspect the deployment entity holds is the terraform state management. Terraform must store state about your managed infrastructure and configuration. This state is used by Terraform to map real world resources to your configuration, keep track of metadata, and to improve performance for large infrastructures. This state is stored by default in a local file named “terraform.tfstate”, but it can also be stored remotely, which works better in a team environment. Defining the state properties (varies in different cloud providers) in deployment entity makes the remote state management easier – specifically in team environment. It will configure the remote state to the appropriate remote backend. For instance, when the blueprint cloud provider is set to Azure, it will configure Azure Storage account as terraform state remote backend, for AWS it will pick S3 automatically.

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Terraform plan

Once we have deployment entity configured, we can directly from the user interface run “terraform plan”. The terraform plan command creates an execution plan. Unless explicitly disabled, it performs a refresh, and then determines what actions are necessary to achieve the desired state specified in the blueprint. This command is a convenient way to check whether the execution plan for a set of changes matches your expectations without making any changes to real resources or to the state. For example, terraform plan might be run before committing a change to version control, to create confidence that it will behave as expected.

Terraform apply

The terraform apply command is used to apply the changes required to reach the desired state of the configuration, or the pre-determined set of actions generated by a terraform plan execution plan. Like “plan”, the “apply” command can also be issued directly from the user interface.

Terraform plan and apply both are issued in an isolated docker container and the output is captured and displayed back to the user interface. However, there’s a cost associated running docker containers on cloud, therefore, it’s disabled in the public site.

Final thoughts

It was fun to write a tool like this. I recommend you give it a go. Especially if you are stepping into Terraform. It can also be helpful for experienced Terraform developers – specifically with the on-screen documenation, type inferance and discovery features.

Some features, I have working progress:

Ability to define policy for each resources and data types
Save a Blueprint as custom module

Stay tuned!

Continuously deploy Blazor SPA to Azure Storage static web site

Lately I am learning ASP.net Blazor – the relatively new UI framework from Microsoft. Blazor is just awesome – the ability to write c# code both in server and client side is extremely productive for .net developers. From Blazor documentations:

Blazor lets you build interactive web UIs using C# instead of JavaScript. Blazor apps are composed of reusable web UI components implemented using C#, HTML, and CSS. Both client and server code is written in C#, allowing you to share code and libraries.

I wanted to write a simple SPA (Single Page Application) and run it as server-less. Azure Storage offers hosting static web sites for quite a while now. Which seems like a very nice option to run a Blazor SPA which executes into the user’s browser (within the same Sandbox as JavaScript does). It also a cheap way to run a Single Page application in Cloud.

I am using GitHub as my source repository for free (in a private repository). Today wanted to create a pipeline that will continuously deploy my Blazor app to the storage account. Azure Pipelines seems to have pretty nice integration with GitHub and it’s has a free tier as well . If either our GitHub repository or pipeline is private, Azure Pipeline still provide a free tier. In this tier, one can run one free parallel job that can run up to 60 minutes each time until we’ve used 1800 minutes per month. That’s pretty darn good for my use case.

I also wanted to build the project many times in my local machine (while developing) in the same way it gets built in the pipeline. Being a docker fan myself, that’s quite no-brainer. Let’s get started.

Pre-requisite

I have performed few steps before I ran after the pipeline – that are beyond the scope of this post.

I have created an Azure Subscription
Provisioned resource groups and storage account
I have created a Service Principal and granted Contributor role to the storage account

Publishing in Docker

I have created a docker file that will build the app, run unit tests and if all goes well, it will publish the app in a folder. All of these are standard dotnet commands.
Once, we have the application published in a folder, I have taken the content of that folder to a Azure CLI docker base image (where CLI is pre-installed) and thrown away the rest of the intermediate containers.

Here’s our docker file:

The docker file expects few arguments (basically the service principal ID, the password of the service principal and the Azure AD tenant ID – these are required for Azure CLI to sign-in to my Azure subscription). Here’s how we can build this image now:

Azure Pipeline as code

We have now the container, time to run it every time a commit has been made to the GitHub repository. Azure Pipeline has a yaml format to define pipeline-as-code – which is another neat feature of Azure Pipelines.

Let’s see how the pipeline-as-code looks like:

I have committed this to the same repository into the root folder.

Creating the pipeline

We need to login to Azure DevOps and create a project (if there’s none). From the build option we can create a new build definition.

The steps to create build definition is very straightforward. It allows us to directly point to a GitHub repository that we want to build.
Almost there. We need to supply the service principal ID, password, tenant ID and storage account names to this pipeline – because both our docker file and the pipeline-as-code expected them as dependencies. However, we can’t just put their values and commit them to GitHub. They should be kept secret.

Azure Pipeline Secret variables

Azure Pipeline allows us to define secret variable for a pipeline. We need to open the build definition in “edit” mode and then go to the top-right ellipses button as below:

Now we can define the values of these secret and keep them hidden (there’s a lock icon there).

That’s all what we need. Ready to deploy the code to Azure storage via this pipeline. If we now go an make a change in our repository it will trigger the pipeline and sure enough it will build-test-publish-deploy to Azure storage as a Static SPA.

Thanks for reading!

Resilient Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) Jobs with Azure Functions

Azure Data Lake Analytics is an on-demand analytics job service that allows writing queries to transform data and grab insights efficiently. The analytics service can handle jobs of any scale instantly by setting the dial for how much power you need.

JObs

In many organizations, these jobs could play a crucial role and reliability of these job executions could be business critical. Lately I have encountered a scenario where a particular USQL job has failed with following error message:

Usql – Job failed due to internal system error – NM_CANNOT_LAUNCH_JM

A bit of research on Google revealed, it’s a system error, which doesn’t leave a lot of diagnostic clue to reason out. Retrying this job manually (by button clicking on portal) yielded success! Which makes it a bit unpredictable and uncertain. However, uncertainty like this is sort of norm while developing Software for Cloud. We all read/heard about Chaos Monkeys of Netflix.

What is resiliency?

Resiliency is the capability to handle partial failures while continuing to execute and not crash. In modern application architectures — whether it be micro services running in containers on-premises or applications running in the cloud — failures are going to occur. For example, applications that communicate over networks (like services talking to a database or an API) are subject to transient failures. These temporary faults cause lesser amounts of downtime due to timeouts, overloaded resources, networking hiccups, and other problems that come and go and are hard to reproduce. These failures are usually self-correcting. (Source)
Today I will present an approach that mitigated this abrupt job failure.

The Solution Design

Basically, I wanted to have a job progress watcher, waiting to see a failed job and then resubmit that job as a retry-logic. Also, don’t want to retry more than once, which has potential to repeat a forever-failure loop. I can have my watcher running at a frequency – like every 5 minutes or so.

Azure Functions

Azure Functions continuously impressing me for its lightweight built and consumption-based pricing model. Functions can run with different triggers, among them time schedule trigger- that perfectly fits my purpose.

Prerequisites

The function app needs to retrieve failed ADLA jobs and resubmit them as needed. This can be achieved with the Microsoft.Azure.Management.DataLake.Analytics, Version=3.0.0.0 NuGet package. We will also require Microsoft.Rest. ClientRuntime.Azure.Authentication, Version=2.0.0.0 NuGet package for Access Token retrievals.

Configuration

We need a Service Principal to be able to interact with ADLA instance on Azure. Managed Service Identity (written about it before) can also be used to make it secret less. However, in this example I will use Service Principal to keep it easier to understand. Once we have our Service Principal, we need to configure them in Function Application Settings.

Hacking the function

[FunctionName("FN_ADLA_Job_Retry")]

public static void Run([TimerTrigger("0 0 */2 * * *")]TimerInfo myTimer, TraceWriter log)

{

var accountName = GetEnvironmentVariable("ADLA_NAME");

var tenantId = GetEnvironmentVariable("TENANT_ID");

var clientId = GetEnvironmentVariable("SERVICE_PRINCIPAL_ID");

var clientSecret = GetEnvironmentVariable("SERVICE_PRINCIPAL_SECRET");

 

ProcessFailedJobsAsync(tenantId, clientId, clientSecret, accountName).Wait();

}

That’s our Azure Function scheduled to be run every 2 hours. Once we get a trigger, we retrieve the AD tenant ID, Service Principal ID, secret and the account name of target ADLA.

Next thing we do, write a method that will give us a ADLA REST client – authenticated with Azure AD, ready to make a call to ADLA account.

private static async Task GetAdlaClientAsync(

string clientId, string clientSecret, string tenantId)

{

var creds = new ClientCredential(clientId, clientSecret);

var clientCreds = await ApplicationTokenProvider

.LoginSilentAsync(tenantId, creds);

 

var adlsClient = new DataLakeAnalyticsJobManagementClient(clientCreds);

return adlsClient;

}

The DataLakeAnalyticsJobManagementClient class comes from Microsoft.Azure.Management.DataLake.Analytics, Version=3.0.0.0 NuGet package that we have already installed into our project.

Next, we will write a method that will get us all the failed jobs,

private static async Task<Microsoft.Rest.Azure.IPage>

GetFailedJobsAsync(string accountName, DataLakeAnalyticsJobManagementClient client)

{

// We are ignoring the data pages that has older jobs

// If that's important to you, use CancellationToken to retrieve those pages

return await client.Job

.ListAsync(accountName,

new ODataQuery(job => job.Result == JobResult.Failed));

}

We have now the capability to retrieve failed jobs, great! Now we should write the real logic that will check for failed jobs that never been retried and resubmit them.

private const string RetryJobPrefix = "RETRY-";

public static async Task ProcessFailedJobsAsync(

string tenantId, string clientId, string clientSecret, string accountName)

{

var client = await GetAdlaClientAsync(clientId, clientSecret, tenantId);

 

var failedJobs = await GetFailedJobsAsync(accountName, client);

 

foreach (var failedJob in failedJobs)

{

// If it's a retry attempt we will not kick this off again.

if (failedJob.Name.StartsWith(RetryJobPrefix)) continue;

 

// we will retry this with a name prefixed with a RETRY

var retryJobName = $"{RetryJobPrefix}{failedJob.Name}";

 

// Before we kick this off again, let's check if we already have retried this before..

if (!(await HasRetriedBeforeAsync(accountName, client, retryJobName)))

{

var jobDetails = await client.Job.GetAsync(accountName, failedJob.JobId.Value);

var newJobID = Guid.NewGuid();

 

var properties = new USqlJobProperties(jobDetails.Properties.Script);

var parameters = new JobInformation(

retryJobName,

JobType.USql, properties,

priority: failedJob.Priority,

degreeOfParallelism: failedJob.DegreeOfParallelism,

jobId: newJobID);

 

// resubmit this job now

await client.Job.CreateAsync(accountName, newJobID, parameters);

}

}

}

private async static Task HasRetriedBeforeAsync(string accountName,

DataLakeAnalyticsJobManagementClient client, string name)

{

var jobs = await client.Job

.ListAsync(accountName,

new ODataQuery(job => job.Name == name));

 

return jobs.Any();

}

This is it all!

Final thoughts!

We can’t avoid failures, but we can respond in ways that will keep our system up or at least minimize downtime. In this example, when one Job fails unpredictably, its effects can cause the system to fail.

We should build our own mitigation against these uncertain factors – with automation.

Deploying Azure web job written in .net core

Lately I have written a .net core web job and wanted to publish it via CD (continuous deployment) from Visual Studio Online. Soon I figured, Azure Web Job SDK doesn’t support (yet) .net core. The work I expected will take 10 mins took about an hour.

If you are also figuring out this, this blog post is what you are looking for.

I will describe the steps and provide a PowerShell script that does the deployment via Kudu API. Kudu is the Source Control management for Azure app services, which has a Zip API that allows us to deploy zipped folder into an Azure app service.

Here are the steps you need to follow. You can start by creating a simple .net core console application. Add a Power Shell file into the project that will do the deployment in your Visual Studio online release pipeline. The Power Shell script will do the following:

Publish the project (using dotnet publish)
Make a zip out of the artifacts
Deploy the zip into the Azure web app

Publishing the project

We will use dotnet publish command to publish our project.

$resourceGroupName = "my-regource-group"
$webAppName = "my-web-job"
$projectName = "WebJob"
$outputRoot = "webjobpublish"
$ouputFolderPath = "webjobpublish\App_Data\Jobs\Continuous\my-web-job"
$zipName = "publishwebjob.zip"

$projectFolder = Join-Path `
    -Path "$((get-item $PSScriptRoot ).FullName)" `
    -ChildPath $projectName
$outputFolder = Join-Path `
    -Path "$((get-item $PSScriptRoot ).FullName)" `
    -ChildPath $ouputFolderPath
$outputFolderTopDir = Join-Path `
    -Path "$((get-item $PSScriptRoot ).FullName)" `
    -ChildPath $outputRoot
$zipPath = Join-Path `
    -Path "$((get-item $PSScriptRoot ).FullName)" `
    -ChildPath $zipName

if (Test-Path $outputFolder)
  { Remove-Item $outputFolder -Recurse -Force; }
if (Test-path $zipName) {Remove-item $zipPath -Force}
$fullProjectPath = "$projectFolder\$projectName.csproj"

dotnet publish "$fullProjectPath"
     --configuration release --output $outputFolder

Create a compressed artifact folder

We will use System.IO.Compression.Filesystem assembly to create the zip file.

Add-Type -assembly "System.IO.Compression.Filesystem"
[IO.Compression.Zipfile]::CreateFromDirectory(
        $outputFolderTopDir, $zipPath)

Upload the zip into Azure web app

Next step is to upload the zip file into the Azure web app. This is where we first need to fetch the credentials for the Azure web app and then use the Kudu API to upload the content. Here’s the script:

function Get-PublishingProfileCredentials
         ($resourceGroupName, $webAppName) {

    $resourceType = "Microsoft.Web/sites/config"
    $resourceName = "$webAppName/publishingcredentials"

    $publishingCredentials = Invoke-AzureRmResourceAction `
                 -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName `
                 -ResourceType $resourceType `
                 -ResourceName $resourceName `
                 -Action list `
                 -ApiVersion 2015-08-01 `
                 -Force
    return $publishingCredentials
}

function Get-KuduApiAuthorisationHeaderValue
         ($resourceGroupName, $webAppName) {

    $publishingCredentials =
      Get-PublishingProfileCredentials $resourceGroupName $webAppName

    return ("Basic {0}" -f `
        [Convert]::ToBase64String( `
        [Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes(("{0}:{1}"
           -f $publishingCredentials.Properties.PublishingUserName, `
        $publishingCredentials.Properties.PublishingPassword))))
}

$kuduHeader = Get-KuduApiAuthorisationHeaderValue `
    -resourceGroupName $resourceGroupName `
    -webAppName $webAppName

$Headers = @{
    Authorization = $kuduHeader
}

# use kudu deploy from zip file
Invoke-WebRequest `
    -Uri https://$webAppName.scm.azurewebsites.net/api/zipdeploy `
    -Headers $Headers `
    -InFile $zipPath `
    -ContentType "multipart/form-data" `
    -Method Post

# Clean up the artifacts now
if (Test-Path $outputFolder)
      { Remove-Item $outputFolder -Recurse -Force; }
if (Test-path $zipName) {Remove-item $zipPath -Force}

PowerShell task in Visual Studio Online

Now we can leverage the Azure PowerShell task in Visual Studio Release pipeline and invoke the script to deploy the web job.

That’s it!

Thanks for reading, and have a nice day!

Zero-Secret application development with Azure Managed Service Identity

Committing the secrets along with application codes to a repository is one of the most commonly made mistakes by many developers. This can get nasty when an application is developed for Cloud deployment. You probably have read the story of checking in AWS S3 secrets to GitHub. The developer corrected the mistake in 5 mins, but still received a hefty invoice because of bots that crawl open source sites, looking for secrets. There are many tools that can scan codes for potential secret leakages, they can be embedded in CI/CD pipeline. These tools do a great job in finding out deliberate or unintentional commits that contains secrets before they get merged to a release/master branch. However, they are not absolutely protecting all potential secrets leaks. Developers still need to be carefully review their codes on every commits.

Azure Managed Service Instance (MSI) can address this problem in a very neat way. MSI has the potential to design application that are secret-less. There is no need to have any secrets (specially secrets for database connection strings, storage keys etc.) at all application codes.

Secret management in application

Let’s recall how we were doing secret management yesterday. Simplicity’s sake, we have a web application that is backed by a SQL server. This means, we almost certainly have a configuration key (SQL Connection String) in our configuration file. If we have storage accounts, we might have the Shared Access Signature (aka SAS token) in our config file.

As we see, we’re adding secrets one after another in our configuration file – in plain text format. We need now, credential scanner tasks in our pipelines, having some local configuration files in place (for local developments) and we need to mitigate the mistakes of checking in secrets to repository.

Azure Key Vault as secret store

Azure Key Vault can simplify these above a lot, and make things much cleaner. We can store the secrets in a Key Vault and in CI/CD pipeline, we can get them from vault and write them in configuration files, just before we publish the application code into the cloud infrastructure. VSTS build and release pipeline have a concept of Library, that can be linked with Key vault secrets, designed just to do that. The configuration file in this case should have some sort of String Placeholders that will be replaced with secrets during CD execution.

The above works great, but you still have a configuration file with all the placeholders for secrets (when you have multiple services that has secrets) – which makes it difficult to manage for local development and cloud developments. An improvement can be keep all the secrets in Key Vault, and let the application load those secrets runtime (during the startup event) directly from the Key vault. This is way easier to manage and also pretty clean solution. The local environment can use a different key vault than production, the configuration logic becomes extremely simpler and the configuration file now have only one secret. That’s a Service Principal secret – which can be used to talk to the key vault during startup.

So we get all the secrets stored in a vault and exactly one secret in our configuration file – nice! But if we accidentally commit this very single secret, all other secrets in vault are also compromised. What we can do to make this more secure? Let’s recap our knowledge about service principals before we draw the solution.

What is Service Principal?

A resource that is secured by Azure AD tenant, can only be accessed by a security principal. A user is granted access to a AD resource on his security principal, known as User Principal. When a service (a piece of software code) wants to access a secure resource, it needs to use a security principal of a Azure AD Application Object. We call them Service Principal. You can think of Service Principals as an instance of an Azure AD Application.A service principal has a secret, often referred as Client Secret. This can be analogous to the password of a user principal. The Service Principal ID (often known as Application ID or Client ID) and Client Secret together can authenticate an application to Azure AD for a secure resource access. In our earlier example, we needed to keep this client secret (the only secret) in our configuration file, to gain access to the Key vault. Client secrets have expiration period that up to the application developers to renew to keep things more secure. In a large solution this can easily turn into a difficult job to keep all the service principal secrets renewed with short expiration time.

Managed Service Identity

Managed Service Identity is explained in Microsoft Documents in details. In layman’s term, MSI literally is a Service Principal, created directly by Azure and it’s client secret is stored and rotated by Azure as well. Therefore it is “managed”. If we create a Azure web app and turn on Manage Service Identity on it (which is just a toggle switch) – Azure will provision an Application Object in AD (Azure Active Directory for the tenant) and create a Service Principal for it and store the client secret somewhere – that we don’t care. This MSI now represents the web application identity in Azure AD. msi

Managed Service Identity can be provisioned in Azure Portal, Azure Power-Shell or Azure CLI as below:

az login
az group create --name myResourceGroup --location westus
az appservice plan create --name myPlan --resource-group myResourceGroup
       --sku S1
az webapp create --name myApp --plan myPlan
       --resource-group myResourceGroup
az webapp identity assign
       --name myApp --resource-group myResourceGroup

Or via Azure Resource Manager Template:

{
"apiVersion": "2016-08-01",
"type": "Microsoft.Web/sites",
"name": "[variables('appName')]",
"location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
"identity": {
"type": "SystemAssigned"
},
"properties": {
"name": "[variables('appName')]",
"serverFarmId": "[resourceId('Microsoft.Web/serverfarms', variables('hostingPlanName'))]",
"hostingEnvironment": "",
"clientAffinityEnabled": false,
"alwaysOn": true
},
"dependsOn": [
"[resourceId('Microsoft.Web/serverfarms', variables('hostingPlanName'))]"
]}

Going back to our key vault example, with MSI we can now eliminate the client secret of Service Principal from our application code.

But wait! We used to read keys/secrets from Key vault during the application startup, and we needed that client secret for that. How we are going to talk to Key vault now without the secret?

Using MSI from App service

Azure provides couple of environment variables for app services that has MSI enabled.

MSI_ENDPOINT
MSI_SECRET

The first one is a URL that our application can make a request to, with the MSI_SECRET as parameter and the response will be a access token that will let us talk to the key vault. This sounds a bit complex, but fortunately we don’t need to do that by hand.

Microsoft.Azure.Services.AppAuthentication library for .NET wraps these complexities for us and provides an easy API to get the access token returned.

We need to add references to the Microsoft.Azure.Services.AppAuthentication and Microsoft.Azure.KeyVault NuGet packages to our application.

Now we can get the access token to communicate to the key vault in our startup like following:


using Microsoft.Azure.Services.AppAuthentication;
using Microsoft.Azure.KeyVault;

// ...

var azureServiceTokenProvider = new AzureServiceTokenProvider();

string accessToken = await azureServiceTokenProvider.GetAccessTokenAsync("https://management.azure.com/");

// OR

var kv = new KeyVaultClient(new KeyVaultClient
.AuthenticationCallback
(azureServiceTokenProvider.KeyVaultTokenCallback));

This is neat, agree? We now have our application configuration file that has no secrets or keys whatsoever. Isn’t it cool?

Step up – activating zero-secret mode

We have managed deploying our web application with zero secret above. However, we still have secrets for SQL database, storage accounts etc. in our key vault, we just don’t have to put them in our configuration files. But they are still there and loaded in startup event of our web application. This is a great improvement, of course. But MSI allows us to take this even better stage.

Azure AD Authentication for Azure Services

To leverage MSI’s full potentials we should use Azure AD authentication (RBAC controls). For instance, we have been using Shared Access Signatures or SQL connection strings to communicate Azure Storage/Service Bus and SQL servers. With AD authentication, we will use a security principal that has a role assignment with Azure RBAC.

Azure gradually enabling AD authentication for resources. As of today (time of writing this blog) the following services/resources supports AD authentication with Managed Service Identity.

Service	Resource ID	Status	Date	Assign access
Azure Resource Manager	https://management.azure.com/	Available	September 2017	Azure portal PowerShell Azure CLI
Azure Key Vault	https://vault.azure.net	Available	September 2017
Azure Data Lake	https://datalake.azure.net/	Available	September 2017
Azure SQL	https://database.windows.net/	Available	October 2017
Azure Event Hubs	https://eventhubs.azure.net	Available	December 2017
Azure Service Bus	https://servicebus.azure.net	Available	December 2017
Azure Storage	https://storage.azure.com/	Preview	May 2018

Example: Accessing Storage Queues with MSI

In our earlier example, we talked about the Azure web app, for which we have enabled Managed Service Identity. In this example we will see how we can put a message in Azure Storage Queue using MSI. Assuming our web application name is:

contoso-msi-web-app

Once we have enabled the managed service identity for this web app, Azure provisioned an identity (an AD Application object and a Service Principal for it) with the same name as the web application, i.e. contoso-msi-web-app.

Now we need to set role assignment for this Service Principal so that it can access to the storage account. We can do that in Azure Portal. Go to the Azure Portal IAM blade (the access control page) and add a role for this principal to the storage account. Of course, you can also do that with Power-Shell.

If you are not doing it in Portal, you need to know the ID of the MSI. Here’s how you get that: (in Azure CLI console)


az resource show -n $webApp -g $resourceGroup
--resource-type Microsoft.Web/sites --query identity

You should see an output like following:

{
"principalId": "xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx",
"tenantId": "xxxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxx",
"type": null
}

The Principal ID is what you are after. We can now assign roles for this principal as follows:

$exitingRoleDef = Get-AzureRmRoleAssignment `
                -ObjectId `
                -RoleDefinitionName "Contributor"  `
                -ResourceGroupName "RGP NAME"
            If ($exitingRoleDef -eq $null) {
                New-AzureRmRoleAssignment `
                    -ObjectId  `
                    -RoleDefinitionName "Contributor" `
                    -ResourceGroupName "RGP NAME"
            }

You can run these commands in CD pipeline with Azure Inline Power Shell tasks in VSTS release pipelines.

Let’s write a MSI token helper class.

We will use the Token Helper in a Storage Account helper class.

Now, let’s write a message into the Storage Queue.

Isn’t it awesome?

Another example, this time SQL server

As of now, Azure SQL Database does not support creating logins or users from service principals created from Managed Service Identity. Fortunately, we have workaround. We can add the MSI principal an AAD group as member, and then grant access to the group to the database.

We can use the Azure CLI to create the group and add our MSI to it:

az ad group create --display-name sqlusers --mail-nickname 'NotNeeded'az ad group member add -g sqlusers --member-id xxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxx

Again, we are using the MSI id as member id parameter here.
Next step, we need to allow this group to access SQL database. PowerShell rescues again:

$query = @"CREATE USER [$adGroupName] FROM EXTERNAL PROVIDER
GO
ALTER ROLE db_owner ADD MEMBER [$adGroupName]
"@
sqlcmd.exe -S "tcp:$sqlServer,1433" `
-N -C -d $database -G -U $sqlAdmin.UserName `
-P $sqlAdmin.GetNetworkCredential().Password `
-Q $query

Let’s write a token helper class for SQL as we did before for storage queue.

We are almost done, now we can run SQL commands from web app like this:

Voila!

Conclusion

Managed Service Identity is awesome and powerful, it really drives application where security of the application are easy to manage over longer period. Specially when you have lots of applications you end up with huge number of service principals. Managing their secrets over time, keeping track of their expiration is a nightmare. Managed Service makes it so beautiful!

Thanks for reading!

CQRS and ES on Azure Table Storage

Lately I was playing with Event Sourcing and command query responsibility segregation (aka CQRS) pattern on Azure Table storage. Thought of creating a lightweight library that facilitates writing such applications. I ended up with a Nuget package to do this. here is the GitHub Repository.

A lightweight CQRS supporting library with Event Store based on Azure Table Storage.

Quick start guide

Install

Install the SuperNova.Storage Nuget package into the project.

Install-Package SuperNova.Storage -Version 1.0.0

The dependencies of the package are:

.NETCoreApp 2.0
Microsoft.Azure.DocumentDB.Core (>= 1.7.1)
Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Debug (>= 2.0.0)
SuperNova.Shared (>= 1.0.0)
WindowsAzure.Storage (>= 8.5.0)

Implemention guide

Write Side – Event Sourcing

Once the package is installed, we can start sourcing events in an application. For example, let’s start with a canonical example of UserController in a Web API project.

We can use the dependency injection to make EventStore avilable in our controller.

Here’s an example where we register an instance of Event Store with DI framework in our Startup.cs

// Config object encapsulates the table storage connection string
services.AddSingleton(new EventStore( ... provide config ));

Now the controller:

[Produces("application/json")]
[Route("users")]
public class UsersController : Controller
{   
    public UsersController(IEventStore eventStore)
    {
        this.eventStore = eventStore; // Here capture the event store handle
    }   
    
    ... other methods skipped here
}

Aggregate

Implementing event sourcing becomes way much handier, when it’s fostered with Domain Driven Design (aka DDD). We are going to assume that we are familiar with DDD concepts (especially Aggregate Roots).

An aggregate is our consistency boundary (read as transactional boundary) in Event Sourcing. (Technically, Aggregate ID’s are our partition keys on Event Store table – therefore, we can only apply an atomic operation on a single aggregate root level.)

Let’s create an Aggregate for our User domain entity:

using SuperNova.Shared.Messaging.Events.Users;
using SuperNova.Shared.Supports;

public class UserAggregate : AggregateRoot
{
    private string _userName;
    private string _emailAddress;
    private Guid _userId;
    private bool _blocked;

Once we have the aggregate class written, we should come up with the events that are relevant to this aggregate. We can use Event storming to come up with the relevant events.

Here are the events that we will use for our example scenario:

public class UserAggregate : AggregateRoot
{

    ... skipped other codes

    #region Apply events
    private void Apply(UserRegistered e)
    {
        this._userId = e.AggregateId;
        this._userName = e.UserName;
        this._emailAddress = e.Email;            
    }

    private void Apply(UserBlocked e)
    {
        this._blocked = true;
    }

    private void Apply(UserNameChanged e)
    {
        this._userName = e.NewName;
    }
    #endregion

    ... skipped other codes
}

Now that we have our business events defined, we will define our commands for the aggregate:

public class UserAggregate : AggregateRoot
{
    #region Accept commands
    public void RegisterNew(string userName, string emailAddress)
    {
        Ensure.ArgumentNotNullOrWhiteSpace(userName, nameof(userName));
        Ensure.ArgumentNotNullOrWhiteSpace(emailAddress, nameof(emailAddress));

        ApplyChange(new UserRegistered
        {
            AggregateId = Guid.NewGuid(),
            Email = emailAddress,
            UserName = userName                
        });
    }

    public void BlockUser(Guid userId)
    {            
        ApplyChange(new UserBlocked
        {
            AggregateId = userId
        });
    }

    public void RenameUser(Guid userId, string name)
    {
        Ensure.ArgumentNotNullOrWhiteSpace(name, nameof(name));

        ApplyChange(new UserNameChanged
        {
            AggregateId = userId,
            NewName = name
        });
    }
    #endregion


    ... skipped other codes
}

So far so good!

Now we will modify the web api controller to send the correct command to the aggregate.

public class UserPayload 
{  
    public string UserName { get; set; } 
    public string Email { get; set; } 
}

// POST: User
[HttpPost]
public async Task Post(Guid projectId, [FromBody]UserPayload user)
{
    Ensure.ArgumentNotNull(user, nameof(user));

    var userId = Guid.NewGuid();    

    await eventStore.ExecuteNewAsync(
        Tenant, "user_event_stream", userId, async () => {

        var aggregate = new UserAggregate();

        aggregate.RegisterNew(user.UserName, user.Email);

        return await Task.FromResult(aggregate);
    });

    return new JsonResult(new { id = userId });
}

And another API to modify existing users into the system:

//PUT: User
[HttpPut("{userId}")]
public async Task Put(Guid projectId, Guid userId, [FromBody]string name)
{
    Ensure.ArgumentNotNullOrWhiteSpace(name, nameof(name));

    await eventStore.ExecuteEditAsync(
        Tenant, "user_event_stream", userId,
        async (aggregate) =>
        {
            aggregate.RenameUser(userId, name);

            await Task.CompletedTask;
        }).ConfigureAwait(false);

    return new JsonResult(new { id = userId });
}

That’s it! We have our WRITE side completed. The event store is now contains the events for user event stream.

Read Side – Materialized Views

We can consume the events in a seperate console worker process and generate the materialized views for READ side.

The readers (the console application – Azure Web Worker for instance) are like feed processor and have their own lease collection that makes them fault tolerant and resilient. If crashes, it catches up form the last event version that was materialized successfully. It’s doing a polling – instead of a message broker (Service Bus for instance) on purpose, to speed up and avoid latencies during event propagation. Scalabilities are ensured by means of dedicating lease per tenants and event streams – which provides pretty high scalability.

How to listen for events?

In a worker application (typically a console application) we will listen for events:

private static async Task Run()
{
    var eventConsumer = new EventStreamConsumer(        
        ... skipped for simplicity
        "user-event-stream", 
        "user-event-stream-lease");
    
    await eventConsumer.RunAndBlock((evts) =>
    {
        foreach (var @evt in evts)
        {
            if (evt is UserRegistered userAddedEvent)
            {
                readModel.AddUserAsync(new UserDto
                {
                    UserId = userAddedEvent.AggregateId,
                    Name = userAddedEvent.UserName,
                    Email = userAddedEvent.Email
                }, evt.Version);
            }

            else if (evt is UserNameChanged userChangedEvent)
            {
                readModel.UpdateUserAsync(new UserDto
                {
                    UserId = userChangedEvent.AggregateId,
                    Name = userChangedEvent.NewName
                }, evt.Version);
            }
        }

    }, CancellationToken.None);
}

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    Run().Wait();
}

Now we have a document collection (we are using Cosmos Document DB in this example for materialization but it could be any database essentially) that is being updated as we store events in event stream.

Conclusion

The library is very light weight and havily influenced by Greg’s event store model and aggreagate model. Feel free to use/contribute.

Thank you!

ASP.net 4.5 applications on Docker Container

Docker makes application deployment easier than ever before. However, most of the Docker articles are often written how to containerized application that runs on Linux boxes. But since Microsoft now released windows containers, the legacy (yes, we can consider .net 4.5 as legacy apps) .net web apps are not left out anymore. I was playing with an ASP.net 4.5 web application recently, trying to make a container out of it. I have found the possibility exciting, not to mentioned that I have enjoyed the process entirely. There are few blogs that I have found very useful, especially this article on FluentBytes. I have however, developed my own scripts for my own application, which is indifferent than the one in FluentBytes (thanks to the author), but I have combined few steps into the dockerfile – that helped me get going with my own containers.
If you are reading this and trying to build container for your asp.net 4.5 applications, here are the steps: In order to explain the process, we’ll assume our application is called LegacyApp. A typical asp.net 4.5 application.

We will install Docker host on windows.
Create a directory (i.e. C:\package) that will contain all the files needed to build the container.
Create the web deploy package of the project from Visual studio. The following images hints the steps we need to follow.

Image: Create a new publish profile

Image: Use ‘Web Deploy Package’ option

Important note: We should name the site in the following format Default Web Site\LegacyApp to avoid more configuration works.

Download the WebDeploy_2_10_amd64_en-US.msi from Microsoft web site
I have ran into an ACL issue while deploying the application. Thanks to the author of FluentBytesarticle, that provides one way to solve the issue by using a powershell file during the installation. We will create that file into the same directory, let’s name it as fixAcls.ps1. The content of the file can be found here
We will create the dockerfile into the same directory, with the content of this sample dockerfile

At this moment our package directory will look somewhat following:

Now we will go to the command prompt and navigate the command prompt to the directory (i.e. C:\package) we worked so far.

Build the container

 c:/> docker build -t legacyappcontainer .

Run the container

c:/> docker run -p 80:80 legacyappcontainer

Now that the container is running, we can start browsing your application. we can’t use the localhost or 127.0.0.0 on our host machine to browse the application (unlike Linux containers), we need to use the machine name or the IP address in our URL. Here’s what we can do:

We will run the inspect command to see the container IP.
```
 C:\> docker -inspect  
```
Now we will take the IP from the JSON and use the IP on our URL to navigate to the application.

The complete dockerfile can be found into the Github Repo.