Setting Up Azure Workload Identity for Containers in Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) Using Terraform - Improved Security for Containers in AKS

 Azure Workload Identity allows your containers in AKS touse amanaged identity to access Azure resources securely without having to depend on connection strings, passwords, access keys or secrets. In other works you can just use DefaultAzureCredential in your containers running in AKS, which will be using workload identity assigned to the container, to get access to the required Azure resource. The roale based access permissions will be in effect and the user assigned managed identity (we can use AD app registration as well bu user assigned managed identity is recommended) used to setup the workload identity in AKS should be given the necessary roles in the target Azure resource. This is far better than having to store secrets or connection stigs to utilized by the dotnet applications. In this post let's understand how to setup workload identity in AKS deployed containers and explore how it simplifies the dotnet application code allowing the application to access Azure resources securely with a managed identity.

Full example source code with terraform and a .NET application using default credentials to access app config service and keyvault is available here in my GitHub repo,

Setting Up Helm in WSL

 Kubernetes applications can be deployed easily with helm. Meny useful tools such as KEDA (Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaler) deployments can be done with helm, using few simple steps. In this post let's look at how to setup helm in WSL so that we can use it to setup applications using helm charts.

Installing .NET 8 Runtime on Ubuntu 22.04 Docker Image

 .NET 8 was release on November 14. There are docker container images for .NET 8 available for dotnet runtime and can be found with tag list here https://mcr.microsoft.com/v2/dotnet/runtime/tags/list . However, if you want to setup .NET 8 runtime on another specific Linux docker image for example on ubuntu:jammy , amd64/ubuntu:22.04 or with a special image such as ffmpeg Linux server image linuxserver/ffmpeg:amd64-version-6.0-cli, where you might want to run your .NET app to use ffmpeg, In such cases, where you you might have to setup .NET 8 runtime on a specific docker image, with your other tools readily available, details mentioned may come in handy.   Lets, see how we can install .NET 8 runtime on base Ubuntu 22.04 images, using a docker file.

Installing .NET 8.0 SDK on WSL

 WSL (Windows subsystem for Linux) is a great way to work with Linux on Windows. .NET 8 is released on November 14th, and let's see how we can get .NET 8 SDK setup on WSL to build and test our .NET 8 apps on Linux on a windows machine.

What we want is when we do a dotnet --list-sdks to see the .NET 8 available in WSL. 

Terraform vs Azure Portal Defaults for Azure Storage Soft Delete

 Azure storage support soft deletion of blobs, blob containers and file shares. When we create a storage account usng Azure portal, by default soft deletion will be enabled with 7 day retention.

Install Kubectl on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

 Kubectl is the command line which will help to do everything with AKS or any other kubernetes set up. To setup or update kubectl on WSL follow the steps below. 

Transform json Files in Azure Pipelines

 In .NET aplication we use the appsettings.json to keep values such as connection string etc for local development mostly. In the context of Azure app servies or containeried envronments etc, we configure mostly app config service (with key vault to manage secrets) to keep our connection information, and any other config values. Howver, sometimes legecy deployments which are still done targeting on premise servers etc might need us to update actual appsetting.josn files or web config files etc. Let's look at how to transform josn files in an Azure pipeline.

Code Unit Test Coverage with Azure Pipelines

 Unit tests are essntial to ensure the code we develop is working as intended. Running the unit tests Azure pipelines is really helpful to not to miss the unit test failures. However, to give afurther assuarance we need to check the coverage of code with unit tests in our projects. Let's look at steps required to obtain a code unit tests coverage report in Azure piplines in  cobertura format.

The expected outcome

The coverage here shows the first library, all code lines (100%) are covered with tests and the the other library has only 22.2% code coverage.