Skip to main content

Windows Azure Active Directory:Access control & Core Directory for free!

One of the most complex parts of the whole cloud story is Identity Management and Access Control. To help you master this complexity Microsoft released Windows Azure Access Control(ACS) as one of it first cloud services. Today ACS has evolved to Windows Azure Active Directory, an Active Directory solution built for the cloud.

Just before the year ending Microsoft announced that two key features of Windows Azure Active Directory became available at no charge:

  • Access control provides centralized authentication and authorization by integrating with consumer identity providers, such as Facebook, or using on-premises Windows Server Active Directory. By having Access Control available you can create a single application that can allow users to login with both their Organizational Credentials stored in Windows Azure AD or Windows Server AD, or to login in using popular consumer service identity services like Microsoft Account, Facebook, Google, or Twitter. Historically, Access Control has been priced based on the number of transactions.
  • Core Directory & Authentication enables capabilities such as single sign-on, user and group management, directory synchronization and directory federation.

Popular posts from this blog

.NET 8–Keyed/Named Services

A feature that a lot of IoC container libraries support but that was missing in the default DI container provided by Microsoft is the support for Keyed or Named Services. This feature allows you to register the same type multiple times using different names, allowing you to resolve a specific instance based on the circumstances. Although there is some controversy if supporting this feature is a good idea or not, it certainly can be handy. To support this feature a new interface IKeyedServiceProvider got introduced in .NET 8 providing 2 new methods on our ServiceProvider instance: object? GetKeyedService(Type serviceType, object? serviceKey); object GetRequiredKeyedService(Type serviceType, object? serviceKey); To use it, we need to register our service using one of the new extension methods: Resolving the service can be done either through the FromKeyedServices attribute: or by injecting the IKeyedServiceProvider interface and calling the GetRequiredKeyedServic...

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.

Kubernetes–Limit your environmental impact

Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes cluster, have a look at Kube-Green . kube-green is a simple Kubernetes operator that automatically shuts down (some of) your pods when you don't need them. A single pod produces about 11 Kg CO2eq per year( here the calculation). Reason enough to give it a try! Installing kube-green in your cluster The easiest way to install the operator in your cluster is through kubectl. We first need to install a cert-manager: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.5/cert-manager.yaml Remark: Wait a minute before you continue as it can take some time before the cert-manager is up & running inside your cluster. Now we can install the kube-green operator: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml Now in the namespace where we want t...