Rendering Issues with Nodejs/NextJS and Azure Front Door

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Recently at my workplace, a new application using Node JS and NextJS was implemented. As with all our public facing websites, it was placed behind Azure’s Front Door service, to provide web application firewall (WAF) and caching functionality.

During testing, it was discovered that the site would sometimes not render properly. However it wasn’t a 100% failure rate.

An Early Theory – Geography

Early on a common theme was noticed. If the user device was located in Brisbane, regardless of OS, browser or ISP used, the site would fail to render. If the device was in or close to Sydney, it would render properly. Trying a few other geographical points using VPNs showed similar behaviours.

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Azure Defender for DevOps – First Impressions

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The recent batch of high profile security incidents at various companies in Australia highlights the need for appropriate security measures across all components of an organisation’s infrastructure. Defender for DevOps is a new functional addon (in preview) to Defender for Cloud. It provides security functionality for your code respositories and associated components.

Setup

When navigating to the Defender for Cloud interface, a new option will appear under the “Cloud Security” heading.

The new DevOps Security option

Once we click on this, we are presented with an intro splash page with steps to getting started. The first step is to connect to the environments. Both Azure DevOps and Github repositories are supported environments.

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Developing a Bicep Validation Pipeline

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Azure’s Bicep is Microsoft’s newer format for defining Azure resources as code. In terms of look and feel, it’s very similar to Terraform.. If one considers Bicep files as code, then it would be a natural step to ensure that code meets a certain level of quality. In addition to that level of quality, because Bicep is deploying infrastructure, we would want to ensure that infrastructure is well designed and has a chance of successfully deploying.

When Bicep started to be adopted by the team I was working in, I became involved in designing a process to meet those quality goals as well as reduce the number of deployment issues.

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Registering a VM with Multiple Azure DevOps Environments

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Azure DevOps has the concept of Environments, a collection of resources which can be used during a pipeline. At the time of writing the only types of resources that can be used are Virtual Machines and Kubernetes resources. The official documentation on registering a VM resource doesn’t explicitly mention there being any issues with using the same resource across multiple environments, apart from “providing a unique name for the agent”. There’s an important consideration with how the registration process works relating to this.

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“Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel” error when using self-hosted Azure DevOps Agent

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Recently the team I’m in has been getting into Microsoft’s new Bicep language. As part of a release pipeline, the infrastructure was being deployed – in this case an Azure App Service. Then the application code was being deployed using the standard “Azure App Service Deploy” task. At this particular task, it would error out:

Error: Could not complete the request to remote agent URL 'https://<App Service Name>.scm.azurewebsites.net/msdeploy.axd?site=<App Service Name>'.
Error: The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel.

The pipeline was being run through our “Default” agent pool, which was a self-hosted agent.

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PowerShell Quality of Life Improvements – PS Repository

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In the last post, we were able to create a Release Pipeline that takes checked and signed Powershell code and deploys it to target servers. In some situations, it may not be desirable or viable to have every server configured as a deployment target. Or there may be a need to have an additional amount of control of the modules that a server gets. To deal with these issues, we can look at setting up a PowerShell Respoistory as an intermediatory step.

Setting Up The Respository

The Respository can be as simple as a file share on a server. At the higher end of complexity, it can be a website running NuGet Gallery. For this case, I’ve gone simple. By using a file share, we negate the need for setting up API keys and the like that a NuGet Gallery would need.

Once the PowerShell Respoistory is created, it needs to be registered on the relevant targets. This is achieved using the Register-PSRepository cmdlet, as shown below:

Register-PSRepository -Name psqol -SourceLocation "\\svr14\psrepo\" -PublishLocation "\\svr14\psrepo\" -InstallationPolicy Trusted

If the InstallationPolicy value is set to “Untrusted”, then there will be a user prompt when attempting to install modules from the Repository.

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PowerShell Quality of Life Improvements – Release

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Releasing a build is typically the final step in the process of developing code. For PowerShell, this takes the form of getting our signed scripts and modules onto target servers to be available for use. This can be easily achieved in Azure DevOps.

Deployment Groups/Targets

The deployment tasks will run on the targets will recieve the scripts. Before that, a Deployment Group needs to be created. This is done by navigating to Pipelines > Deplyment Groups and clicking “Add new deployment group”. The group needs to be given a name.

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PowerShell Quality of Life Improvements – Automatic Versioning

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Once we start doing processes like putting PowerShell code into git repositories, signing it and effectively creating new versions of it, it becomes useful to be able to automatically manage the versioning of our scripts and modules. The version number acts as an easy visual indicator of whether the script is the latest or not.

Introducing Token Replacement

Since the version number will change with each “build”, we will want to put in some sort of place holder value – a token. In my sample module, I change the version value to reference this token:

# Version number of this module.
ModuleVersion = '#{fullVersion}#'

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