Free plan are good if you don’t care about backup, auto-scaling, staging slots and storage.
As of this writing, these are Azure App service plan;
For less demanding workloads (Dev / Test)
For most production workloads (Production)
Other production tier options are here;
To scale up/down, go to Azure web application and select Scale up (App Service plan). The selected pricing tier will have a blue border around it. Change the lower pricing tier based on your requirements.
Once you have reached to a point where you will need more than 1GB of storage and RAM, then I think S1 production plan might be your starting point. This offers 10GB of storage, and all benefits that free tier does not provide.
I am going to create and configure Azure key vault in this demo. I am assuming that an app services has already been provisioned. We need to make a configuration change for SQL connection so that Key Vault secret can be used without touching the application code.
Provision the Azure Key Vault
For this demo, I am going to use new permission model that is based on Azure role-based access control (RBAC).
I am leaving it as Public endpoint to match the App service configuration.
Click on Review + Create button to start the deployment.
Once created, add yourself to the role “Key Vault Administrator” via the Access Control (IAM). Now you can start managing secrets.
Add the connection string to the Key Vault secrets.
Secret type (Upload options) “Manual”, give it a name and set the value to the SQL Database connection string to your Azure SQL or Azure SQL VM.
Click on Create. Once created, click on the secret to see the secret details, then click again on the current version.
Copy Secret Identifier to your clipboard.
Add the Secret identifier reference to the Azure App Service Settings
Open the App Service configuration settings, and ad a new Connection string setting.
Type the name of the connection string (“SqlConnectionString” for application) and set the value. You can use the same name that you have used in appsettings.json file. Set the value;
On the App Service, click on Identity to enable the System Assigned identity. Click on save after turning “On” the status.
Click on the “Role Assignments” button and then click on the “Add role assignment”. In the role assignment, choose scope “Key Vault”, subscription the subscription where you created the Key Vault on previous steps and the name of the Key Vault resource. For the role just select “Key Vault Secrets User (preview)”
You can go to the appsettings.json/web.config file of your application and clear the connection string value;
Visit your website and see if it loads successfully. The connection string is safely stored in the Azure Key Vault, and it’s no longer stored on the file system.
Known issues
ERROR: You might get an error “Keyword not supported: ‘@microsoft.keyvault(secreturi'”. I have experienced that the RBAC permissions can take a one or two minutes to be applied, so try after a few minutes. Also try restarting the application thought the App Service portal so nothing is cached.
another error might be this;
ERROR: Format of the initialization string does not conform to specification starting at index 0.
Check your connection string. it has spaces or is not right.
If you want to run SSIS Packages from SQL Server Agent, the job might fail because of security context. Here are the steps that can help solve this problem;
Creating a credential to be used by proxy
USE MASTER
GO
--Drop the credential if it is already existing
IF EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM sys.credentials WHERE name = N'SSISProxyCredentials')
BEGIN
DROP CREDENTIAL [SSISProxyCredentials]
END
GO
CREATE CREDENTIAL [SSISProxyCredentials]
WITH IDENTITY = N'server\ServiceProxyAll',
SECRET = N'secret'
GO
Creating a proxy account, Drop the credential if it is already existing
USE msdb
GO
--Drop the proxy if it is already existing
IF EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM msdb.dbo.sysproxies WHERE name = N'SSISProxyDemo')
BEGIN
EXEC dbo.sp_delete_proxy
@proxy_name = N'SSISProxyDemo'
END
GO
Create a proxy and use the same credential as created above
--Create a proxy and use the same credential as created above
EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_proxy
@proxy_name = N'SSISProxyDemo',
@credential_name=N'SSISProxyCredentials',
@enabled=1
GO
Granting proxy account to SQL Server Agent Sub-systems
USE msdb
GO
--You can view all the sub systems of SQL Server Agent with this command
--You can notice for SSIS Subsystem id is 11
EXEC sp_enum_sqlagent_subsystems
GO
Grant created proxy to SQL Agent subsystem, You can grant created proxy to as many as available subsystems
EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_grant_proxy_to_subsystem
@proxy_name=N'SSISProxyDemo',
@subsystem_id=11 --subsystem 11 is for SSIS as you can see in the above image
GO
View all the proxies granted to all the subsystems
EXEC dbo.sp_enum_proxy_for_subsystem
Granting proxy access to security principals
USE msdb
GO
--Grant proxy account access to security principals that could be
--either login name or fixed server role or msdb role
--Please note, Members of sysadmin server role are allowed to use any proxy
EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_grant_login_to_proxy
@proxy_name=N'SSISProxyDemo'
,@login_name=N'LABSVR01\ServiceProxyAll'
--,@fixed_server_role=N''
--,@msdb_role=N''
GO
View logins provided access to proxies
EXEC dbo.sp_enum_login_for_proxy
GO
Follow this article setting up proxy account using UI and setting up SSIS environment to use Azure Storage.
