Swinging for the fences (a story… part1)
Hey, guess what, it’s Baseball Day✌!!! We’ve got a beautiful field right there, so game on…
Yeah, you guessed I am a sports enthusiast or to be precise, a baseball fan, and hence, why I want to discuss baseball. Did you guess right? Well…NO, I am neither a sports enthusiast nor a baseball fan. Sorry to disappoint you😜.
I am an Unapologetic Tech Enthusiast, and this article is just going to be a story about Azure. So, why do I have a baseball image included in the post? You are about to find out…
The phrase ‘swing for the fences’ likely originates from the sport of baseball. How so? Well, there are fences along the edges of the outfield. If a batter hits the ball hard enough, the ball would fly over the fences, making it impossible for the defensive team to catch it. This would result in a homerun for the batter’s team. Hence, a player that is ‘swinging for the fences’ is hoping to hit a homerun, and that’s not an easy thing to do! reference:https://knowyourphrase.com/swinging-for-the-fences
Metaphorically, it just simply means putting your all to achieve a goal. Going the extra mile.
So what does this baseball term have in common with Azure? Well, I am not here to pitch to you which CSP has better offers, is cost-friendly, has great UI, or whatnot. I am just going to describe the process of Converting unsupported certificates formats to supported certificate formats by Azure.
Now, let me introduce myself. Let’s just humbly say I’m a backend (PaaS) engineer for Azure which in layman means MS Azure Support Engineer. Usually, the terms Backend and Frontend are commonly used with Software Development/Engineering roles. However, the Backend term fits my job role only with a different context, as we provide assistance to the Frontend users of Azure in order to resolve their issues. We repro their issue in some cases during troubleshooting from the backend while in other cases, based on experience, we immediately have a fix for their issue without a repro, by merely reading through their case statement.
Some weeks ago, I had a case to work on regarding SSL certificate for Cloud Services. Now let me explain something to you before I go further, some MS Azure users tend to mix up the generic term ‘Cloud Services’ which implies all cloud-based services, with one of the compute services offered by Azure, ‘Cloud Services (classic)’, which is one of the earliest computing services (products) offered by Azure. Cloud Services (classic) is an example of PaaS. Recently, MS launched Cloud Services (Extended Support) which is the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) based deployment model of the Azure CS product. However, the scope of this article is not to explain this compute service, to learn more, kindly click Azure Cloud Services (Classic).
That said, the first and major step required to assist a customer in resolving their issues is to Understand the issue and the Most-fulfilling part is when you actually get the issue resolved. So back to my story, I understood from the case statement that the customer was already using a certificate with his Cloud Services(the compute service) but needed to renew it. The obvious reason of course was that the current one in use already expired and hence his web app was no longer secured.
Though I knew what the customer wanted to do, for the sake of due diligence, I needed to confirm if he wanted to renew or add the certificate to his cloud services(i.e. if he wanted to know how to upload the certificate). If he wanted to renew, that would have been out of the scope of support provided by my team while if he just wanted to upload which I was 98% sure wasn’t the case as a larger percent of the customers are IT Experts in their field, then that’s within the support scope to assist him with. After confirmation, it turned out he already Renewed his Certificate and this was obtained from GoDaddy but surprisingly he only wanted to upload it on Azure for his Cloud Services(the compute service).
Now, to Upload a TLS/SSL certificate on Azure, is this within the scope of support? Well, Yes it is. However, the caveat here was the certificate files obtained from GoDaddy. These files had all extensions not supported by Azure. Read this for certificates allowed for Azure Cloud Services. So I knew the customer needed to convert these certificate files to the allowed format before uploading on Azure but the customer does not seem to know this, I realized all he wanted was to upload the certificate on Azure. Apparently, he was not the one who uploaded the current one in use from what I gathered.
The customer’s particular scenario of converting certificate files was out of the scope of support as this should be figured out by him since the certificates obtained were not Azure products.
So what did I do…click here to read what happened next.
I hope I did not bore you too much with my story😉
Terms used:
CSP: Cloud Service Provider
PaaS: Platform as a Service
Repro: Reproduce
SSL: Secure Sockets Layer (now TLS: Transport Layer Security)
