Tag: Azure
All the articles with the tag "Azure".
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Disabling session affinity in Azure App Service Web Apps (Websites)
In one of our production systems, we’re using Azure Websites to host a back-end web API. It runs on several machines and benefits from the automatic load balancing we get on Azure Websites. When going through request logs, however, we discovered that of these several machines a few were getting a lot of traffic, some got less and one even only got hit by our monitoring system and no other traffic. That sucks! In our back-end web API we’re not using any session state or other techniques where we’d expect the same client to always end up on the same server. Ideally, we want round-robin load balancing, distributing traffic across machines as much as possible. How to do this with Azure Websites?
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Working with a private npm registry in Azure Web Apps
Using Azure Web Apps, we can deploy and host Node applications quite easily. But what to do with packages the site depends on? Do we have to upload them manually to Azure Web Apps? Include them in our Git repository? None of that: we just have to make sure our app’s package,json is checked in so that Azure Web Apps can install them during deployment. Let’s see how.
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Not enough space on the disk - Azure Cloud Services
I have been using Microsoft Azure Cloud Services since PDC 2008 when it was first announced. Ever since, I’ve been a huge fan of “cloud services”, the cattle VMs in the cloud that are stateless. In all those years, I have never seen this error, until yesterday: There is not enough space on the disk.at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath)at System.IO.FileStream.WriteCore(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 count)at System.IO.BinaryWriter.Write(Byte[] buffer, Int32 index, Int32 count) Help! Where did that come from! I decided to set up a remote desktop connection to one of my VMs and see if any of the disks were full or near being full. Nope!
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What happened to Code Spaces could happen to you. On Amazon, Azure and any host out there.
Earlier this week, a sad thing happened to the version control hosting service Code Spaces. A malicious person gained access to their Amazon control panel and after demanding a ransom to the owners of Code Spaces, that malicious person started deleting data and EC2 instances. After a couple of failed attempts from Code Spaces to stop this from happening, the impossible happened: the hacker rendered Code Spaces dead. Everything that was their business is gone. As they state themselves: Code Spaces will not be able to operate beyond this point, the cost of resolving this issue to date and the expected cost of refunding customers who have been left without the service they paid for will put Code Spaces in a irreversible position both financially and in terms of on going credibility.
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Microsoft Azure cloud plugin for TeamCity (dabbling in Java code)
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me in several stages of anger at Java. After two weeks of learning, experimenting, coding and even getting it all to compile, I’m proud to announce an inital very early preview of my Microsoft Azure cloud plugin for TeamCity. This plugin provides Microsoft Azure cloud support for TeamCity. By configuring a Microsoft Azure cloud in TeamCity, a set of known virtual build agents can be started and stopped on demand by the TeamCity server so we can benefit from Microsoft Azure’s cost model (a stopped VM is almost free) and scaling model (only start new instances when we need them).
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Optimizing calls to Azure storage using Fiddler
Last week, Xavier and I were really happy for achieving a milestone. After having spent quite some evenings on bringing Visual Studio Online integration to MyGet, we were happy to be mentioned in the TechEd keynote and even pop up in quite some sessions. We also learned ASP.NET vNext was coming and it would leverage NuGet as an important part of it. What we did not know, however, is that the ASP.NET team would host all vNext preview packages from MyGet. But we soon noticed and found our evening hours were going to be very focused for another few days… On May 12th, we all of a sudden saw usage of our service double in an instant. Ouch! Here’s what Google Analytics told us:
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Windows Azure Storage magic with Shared Access Signatures
When building cloud applications on Windows Azure, it’s always a good thing to delegate as much work to specialized services as possible. File downloads would be one good example: these can be streamed directly from Windows Azure blob storage to your client, without having to pass a web application hosted on Windows Azure Cloud Services or Web Sites. Why occupy the web server with copying data from a request stream to a response stream? Let blob storage handle it! When thinking this through there may be some issues you may think of. Here are a few: Let’s answer these! Keeping blobs secure is pretty easy on Windows Azure Blob Storage, but it’s also sort of an all-or-nothing story… Either you make all blobs in a container private, or you make them public.
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Pro NuGet second edition is out
Pfew! Around February 2013, Xavier and I started planning work on an update of our book. Eight months later, we’re proud to present you with Pro NuGet (second edition). It’s been a tough couple of months writing this: Xavier has become a father for the second time (congratulations!), we’ve had two massive updates to NuGet we had to work in our book, … But here it is! What’s new? Next to that there is a lot more meat in there! We would love to get your feedback! E-mail us or write a review on your blog or Amazon. Enjoy the read! PS: Thanks to our excellent reviewers (the NuGet team) and everyone at Apress! There is a lot of people involved in getting a quality book out there. Thanks!
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A new year's present: introducing Glimpse plugins for Windows Azure
Have you tried Glimpse before? It shows you server-side information like execution times, server configuration, request data and such in your browser. At the February MVP Summit this year, Anthony, Nik and I had a chat about what would be useful information to be displayed in Glimpse when working on Windows Azure. Some beers and a bit of coding later, we had a proof-of-concept showing Windows Azure runtime configuration data in a Glimpse tab. Today, we are happy to announce a first public preview of two Windows Azure tabs in Glimpse: the Glimpse.WindowsAzure package displaying runtime information, and Glimpse.WindowsAzure.Storage collecting information about traffic from and to storage.
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Visual Studio Online for Windows Azure Web Sites
Today’s official Visual Studio 2013 launch provides some interesting novelties, especially for Windows Azure Web Sites. There is now the choice of choosing which pipeline to run in (classic or integrated), we can define separate applications in subfolders of our web site, debug a web site right from within Visual Studio. But the most impressive one is this. How about… an in-browser editor for your application? Let’s take a quick tour of it. After creating a web site we can go to the web site’s configuration we can enable the Visual Studio Online preview. Once enabled, simply navigate to .scm.azurewebsites.net/dev">https://<yoursitename>.scm.azurewebsites.net/dev or click the link from the dashboard, provide your site credentials and be greeted with Visual Studio Online.