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Welcome back, tech enthusiasts! 🚀

This week’s edition is packed with GitHub security insights, Azure innovations, and practical .NET updates. From GitHub Actions security incidents to optimizing cloud costs with FinOps, there’s plenty to explore.

Before we dive in, a quick heads-up: Next week, I’ll be at the Microsoft MVP Summit, so there won’t be a newsletter. Due to jet lag, the week after is also uncertain—but I’ll be back soon with fresh insights!

Here’s what’s in store this week:

• 🔐 GitHub Actions security risks & the end of long-lived PATs

• 💡 Why great documentation is essential for developers

• 🚀 How Microsoft Copilot scales using Azure CosmosDB

• 🏗️ Adding user login to Azure apps with just Bicep

• ⚡ Monitoring .NET apps with Grafana & optimizing FinOps in Azure

With so much happening in the cloud and developer ecosystem, let’s dive in!

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GitHub Digest

My colleague Rob Bos, an MVP and GitHub Star, knows his stuff about GitHub Security, particularly about GitHub Actions. Recently, there was a security incident, and he wrote down his thoughts in this LinkedIn Pulse article:

Personal Access Tokens are pretty handy; just a long string, you get access to whatever you want. Unfortunately; when someone else has that PAT as well, they can do the same.

Short-lived tokens are a more secure alternative, see how you can apply those in your workflows.

Traditionally, you needed to buy GitHub Advanced Security as one complete add-on to your enterprise plan. That would give you all the components like secret scanning, dependency management, and code scanning.

Next month; there will be a license change, allowing you to buy secret scanning and code scanning separately. Read more to see how you can benefit from this change.

Coding Corner

Do not underestimate the need for documentation. The easier a developer can get started with his/her tasks, the cheaper the operation will be.

Azure Updates & Insights

Did you know that MS Copilot is using Azure CosmosDB for their storage needs? Find out how they use this database to scale out to millions of users.

Bicep (and Arm) are mostly used for the management plane; you can instruct it to provision resources, but not access the data plane. For that, you need a system like Terraform. For example; you can deploy a database, but not do anything with that database like creating a user.

That is changing with the Graph extension, which gives you programmatic access to Entra ID. See how that works when you want to add a user login to your app using Bicep only.

The FinOps toolkit is a collection of tools, processes and PowerBI dashboards to help you in the Azure FinOps world. Version 0.8 is released recently, so find out what is new.

.NET Nook

Want a simple way to get metrics from your app and show it in Grafana? Using a docker container it is relatively easy to connect those together.

First; don’t use SMS authentication as it is no longer secure. But next to that; it is a good example of how to extend the ASP.NET Core Identity system.

Closing Thoughts

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