I was a bit frustrated to hear that the Azure DNS service didn’t have a UI.

It is however understandable, the main purpose for introducing a DNS service in the cloud environment is primarily around environments that will be run up programmatically (i.e. Infrastructure as code).

But I’ve been meaning to dig my hands into a small sized angularJS project to try out some stuff so I decided to write a small Web UI for it, this is why I haven’t done any posts in a week. Well that and my cousin’s wedding 🙂

It is starting to Take shape now in GitHub:

https://github.com/HostedSolutions/AzureDNSUI

It’s based on the Authentication libraries published in the TODO example app from MS.

There is still a bit of work to be done, i’ll be doing some follow-up posts, and hopefully be able to get it into the Azure Marketplace.

Currently there is a requirement of configuring an Azure Application in Azure AD, then putting the AppID and tenant in to the config to make it work. As I understand it, if it is a marketplace app that will configure this automatically in your environment when its installed.

This is configured under the active directory section in Azure, and there is a few gotchas i will cover in followup posts. but hopefully won’t be needed in the long run.

<add key="ida:Tenant" value="hostedsolutionscomau.onmicrosoft.com" />
<add key="ida:Audience" value="ffd940d1-3eed-425b-9ae9-fd0e9955db29" />

The app itself is pretty basic, after a bounce and back to Azure/MSLive to login, you come back with a token that is passed with the API calls from JavaScript. The Azure Management gear is all CORS enabled so it can be hosted on a different domain from the APIs and runs fine.

You simply select the Subscription then resource group and you get a list of domains in that resource group.

Then once a domain is selected you can edit the individual records.

I noticed with the schema of the JSON objects they are designed hierarchical, assuming that for each A record, for example, there will most likely be multiple IPs (i.e. DNS load balancing), so i have tried to design the UI to suite this.

The exception was the TXT records, if someone can explain to me why you would have multiple records for a single TXT value, I’d be glad to fix it up, but even looking at the RFCs left me saying WTF?

I think it will be another few weeks before this is completed and ready for the market place. But I think its a tool worth having, because while the “run up” of Infrastructure as Code deployments might be all command line based, sometimes its handy to be able to use UI to check your work and make minor “on the spot” fix ups for troubleshooting, rather than having to pour through command lines.

more to come in the coming weeks…