Author Archives: James Westall

One of the many things I love about the cloud is the ease at which it allows me to develop and deploy solutions. I recently got married – An event which is both immensely fulfilling and incredibly stressful to organise. Being a digital first millennial couple, my partner and I wanted to deliver our invites electronically. Being the stubborn technologist that I am, I used the wedding as an excuse to practice my cloud & python skills! This blog neatly summarises what I implemented, and the fun I dealt with along the way.

The Plan – How do I want to do this?

For me, the main goal moving was to deliver a simple, easy to use solution which enabled me to keep sharp on some cloud technology, time and complexity was not a deciding factor. Being a consultant, I generally touch a multitude of different services/providers and I need to keep challenged to stay up to date on a broad range of things.

For my partner, it was important that I could quickly deliver a website, at low cost, with personalised access codes and email capability – A fully fledged mobile app would have been the nirvana, but I’m not that great at writing code (yet) – Sorry hun, maybe at a future vow renewal?

When originally planning, I really wanted to design a full end to end solution using functions & all the cool serverless features. I quickly realised that this would also take me too long to keep my partner happy, so I opted for a simpler path – an ACI deployment, with Azure Traffic manager allowing a nice custom domain (Feature request please MS). I designed Azure Storage as a simple table backend, and utilised SendGrid as the email service. Azure DNS allowed me to host all the relevant records, and I built my containers for ACR Using Azure DevOps.

Implementing – How to use this flask thing?

Ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you I will give just about anything a crack. I generally use python when required for scripting/automation and I really don’t use it for much beyond that. When investigating how to build a modern web app, I really liked the idea of learning some more python – It’s such a versatile language and really deserves more of my attention. I also looked at using React, WordPress & Django. However I really hate writing javascript, this blog is WordPress so no learning there, and Django was have been my next choice after flask.

Implementing into flask was actually extremely simple for basic operations. I’m certain I could have implemented my routing in a neater manner – perhaps a task for future refactoring/pull requests! I really liked the ability to test flask apps by simply running python3 app.py. A lot quicker than a full docker build process, and super useful in development mode!

The template based model that flask enables developers to utilise is extremely quick. Bootstrap concepts haven’t really changed since it was released in 2011, and modifying a single template to cater for different users was really simple.

For user access, I used a simple model where a code was utilised to access the details page, and this code was then passed through all the web requests from then on. Any code submitted that did not exist in azure storage simply fired a small error!

import flask 
from string import Template
from flask import request
from flask import render_template
from flask import redirect
import os
from datetime import datetime
from azure.cosmosdb.table.tableservice import TableService
from azure.cosmosdb.table.models import Entity

app = flask.Flask(__name__)
app.config['StorageName'] = os.environ.get('StorageName')
app.config['StorageKey'] = os.environ.get('StorageKey')

#StorageName = os.environ.get('StorageName')
#StorageKey = os.environ.get('StorageKey')
@app.route('/', methods=['GET'])
def home():
    return render_template('index.html')  # render a template

@app.route('/badCode')
def badCode():
    return render_template('index.html', formError = "Incorrect Code, Please try again.")

@app.route('/user/<variable>', methods=['GET'])
def userpage(variable):
    table_service = TableService(account_name=app.config['StorageName'], account_key=app.config['StorageKey'])
    name= variable.lower()
    try:
        details = table_service.get_entity('weddingtable', 'Invites', name)
        print(details)
        return render_template("user.html",People1=details.Names, People2=details.Names2, hide=details.Hide, userCode = variable, commentmessage=details.Message)
    except:
        return redirect('/badCode')


@app.route('/locations')
def locations():
    return render_template('locations.html',HomeLink="./")

@app.route('/locations/<UserCode>')
def authedUser(UserCode):
    link = "../user/" + UserCode
    return render_template('locations.html',HomeLink=link)

@app.route('/code', methods=['POST'])
def handle_userCode():
    codepath = '/user/' + request.form['personalCode']
    return redirect(codepath)

@app.route('/Thankyou/<UserCode>')
def thank(UserCode):

    codepath = '/user/' + UserCode
    return render_template('thankyou.html', HomeLink=codepath)

@app.route('/RSVP', methods=['POST'])
def handle_RSVP():
    print('User Code Is: {}'.format(request.form['userCode']))
    table_service = TableService(account_name=app.config['StorageName'], account_key=app.config['StorageKey'])
    now = datetime.now()
    time = now.strftime("%m-%d-%Y %H-%M-%S")
    rsvp = {'PartitionKey': 'rsvp', 'RowKey': time ,'GroupID': request.form['userCode'],
        'comments': request.form['comment'], 'Status': request.form['action']}
    print(rsvp)
    table_service.insert_entity('weddingrsvptable', rsvp)
    redirectlink = '/Thankyou/{}'.format(request.form['userCode'])
    return redirect(redirectlink)

app.run(host='0.0.0.0', port=80, debug=True)

The end result of my bootstrap & flask configuration was really quite simple – my Fiance was quite impressed!

Deployment – Azure DevOps, ACI, ARM & Traffic Manager

Deploying to Azure Container Registry and Instances is almost 100% idiotproof within Azure DevOps. Within about five minutes in the GUI, you can get a working pipeline with a docker build & push to your Azure Container Registry, and then refresh your Azure Container Instances from there. Microsoft doesn’t really recommend using ACI for anything beyond a simple workloads, and I found support for nearly everything to be pretty limited.
Because I didn’t want a fully fledged AKS cluster/host or an App Service Plan running containers, I used traffic manager to work around the custom domain limitations of ACI. As a whole, the traffic manager profile would cost me next to nothing, and I knew that I wouldn’t be receiving many queries to the services.

At some point I looked at deploying my storage account using ARM templates, however I found that table storage is currently not supported for deployment using this method. You will notice that my azure pipeline uses the Azure Shell commands to do this. I didn’t get around to automating the integration from storage to container instances – Mostly because I had asked my partner to fill out another storage account table manually and didn’t want to move anything!

trigger:
- master

pool:
  vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'

variables:
  imageName: 'WeddingContainer'

steps:
- task: Docker@2
  inputs:
    containerRegistry: 'ACR Connection'
    repository: 'WeddingWebsite'
    command: 'buildAndPush'
    Dockerfile: 'Dockerfile'
    tags: |
      v1
- task: Docker@2
  inputs:
    containerRegistry: 'ACR Connection'
    command: 'login'

- task: AzureCLI@2
  inputs:
    azureSubscription: 'PAYG - James Auchterlonie(2861f6bf-8886-47a9-bc4b-de1a11df0e5f)'
    scriptType: 'bash'
    scriptLocation: 'inlinescript'
    inlineScript: 'az storage account create --name weddingazdevops --resource-group CONTAINER-RG01 --location australiaeast --sku Standard_LRS --kind StorageV2'

- task: AzureCLI@2
  inputs:
    azureSubscription: 'PAYG - James Auchterlonie(2861f6bf-8886-47a9-bc4b-de1a11df0e5f)'
    scriptType: 'bash'
    scriptLocation: 'inlineScript'
    inlineScript: 'az storage table create -n weddingtable --account-name weddingazdevops'

- task: AzureCLI@2
  inputs:
    azureSubscription: 'PAYG - James Auchterlonie(2861f6bf-8886-47a9-bc4b-de1a11df0e5f)'
    scriptType: 'bash'
    scriptLocation: 'inlineScript'
    inlineScript: 'az container create --resource-group CONTAINER-RG01 --name weddingwebsite --image youracrnamehere.azurecr.io/weddingwebsite:v1 --dns-name-label weddingwebsite --ports 80 --location australiaeast --registry-username youracrname --registry-password $(ACRSECRET) --environment-variables StorageName=$(StorageName) StorageKey=$(StorageKey)'

- task: AzureCLI@2
  inputs:
    azureSubscription: 'PAYG - James Auchterlonie(2861f6bf-8886-47a9-bc4b-de1a11df0e5f)'
    scriptType: 'bash'
    scriptLocation: 'inlineScript'
    inlineScript: 'az container restart --name weddingwebsite --resource-group CONTAINER-RG01'

For my outbound email I opted to utilise SendGrid. You can actually sign up for this service within the Azure Portal as a “third party service”. It adds an object to your resource group, however administration is still within the SendGrid portal.

Issues?

As an overall service, I found my deployment to be relatively stable. I ran two issues through my deployment, both of which were not too simple to resolve.

1. Azure Credit & Azure DNS – About halfway through the live period after sending my invites, I noticed that my service was down. This was actually due to DNS not servicing requests due to insufficient credit. A SQL server I was also labbing had killed my funds! This was actually super frustrating to fix as I had another unrelated issue with the Owner RBAC on my subscription – My subscription was locked for IAM editing due to insufficient funds, and I couldn’t add another payment method because I was not owner – Do you see the loop too?
I would love to see some form of payment model that allows for upfront payment of DNS queries in blocks or chunks – Hopefully this would prevent full scale DNS based outages when using Azure DNS and Credit based payment in the future.

2. SPAM – I also had a couple of reports of emails sent from sendgrid being marked as spam. This was really frustrating, however not common enough for me to dig into as a whole, especially considering I was operating in the free tier. I added a DKIM & DMARC Record for my second run of emails and didn’t receive as much feedback which was good.

The Cost – Was it worth it?

All in All the solution I implemented was pretty expensive when compared to other online products and even other Azure services. I could have definitely saved money by using App Services, Azure Functions or even static Azure Storage websites. Thankfully, the goal for me wasn’t to be cheap. It was practice. Even better though, my employer provides me with an Azure Credit for dev/test, so I actually spent nothing! As such, I really think this exercise was 100% worth it.

Summary – Totally learnt some things here!

I really hoped you enjoyed this small writeup on my experience deploying small websites in Azure. I spent a grand total of about three hours over two weeks tinkering on this project, and you can see a mostly sanitised repo here. I definitely appreciated the opportunity to get a little bit better at python, and will likely look to revisit the topic again in the future!

(Heres a snippet of the big day – I’m most definitely punching above my average! 😂)