Skip to main content

Fix expired secrets in Azure DevOps Service Connections

· 2 min read
Shpend Kelmendi
Software Engineer & Architect

Workload Identity Federation is the recommended approach for Service Connection. So why would I use the old approach with an app registration where I need to rotate the secret by myself? Well, there are some pipeline tasks which doesn't support Workload Identity Federation.
And in this case, you have to use the old approach.
And today was the day of rotation.
And a team member tried to renew the secret but didn't know how to do it, because the problem is still not fixed correctly in the UI.

Let's check the steps to fix it.

When the cloud has a cold: Lessons in resilience

· 6 min read
Shpend Kelmendi
Software Engineer & Architect
Cloud is down: Building Resilient Systems

October 9th - Azure Front Door takes a nap. Traffic reroutes, dashboards go red, and half the internet suddenly learns what "global edge dependency" really means.

October 20th - an AWS region (US-EAST-1) goes down. Not the apocalypse, just enough to make dashboards bleed red, engineers reach for coffee, and LinkedIn light up with "That's why we use multi-cloud" posts.

October 29th - Azure Front Door stumbles again. Same story, different day. And somewhere in between, a few other providers quietly joined the chaos with their own "we're experiencing elevated error rates" moments.

It's been one of those months when you realize: even the clouds catch colds. The uptime gods don't play favorites - not AWS, not Azure, not anyone.

And that's when Barry O'Reilly's Residuality Theory came to mind again - the idea that what really matters isn't the outage itself, but what's left behind.
The tangled complexity.
The assumptions that didn't hold.
The edge cases you dismissed with a confident, "That'll never happen."

Spoiler: it just did and will again.

Infastructure as Code (IaC) - Your First Steps with IaC in Azure

· 5 min read
Shpend Kelmendi
Software Engineer & Architect
Infastructure as Code (IaC) - Your First Steps with IaC in Azure

In the cloud world, it’s all about speed, repeatability, and stability. That’s where Infrastructure as Code (IaC) comes in. Many imagine YAML files or PowerShell scripts, but the truth is: Anyone can start with IaC today.

In this post, you’ll learn:

  • What IaC is and why it matters
  • How to get started in Azure – even without deep experience