Tag: Scalability
All the articles with the tag "Scalability".
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Hands-on Windows Azure Services for Windows
A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced their Windows Azure Services for Windows Server. If you’ve ever heard about the Windows Azure Appliance (which is vaporware imho :-)), you’ll be interested to see that the Windows Azure Services for Windows Server are in fact bringing the Windows Azure Services to your datacenter. It’s still a Technical Preview, but I took the plunge and installed this on a bunch of virtual machines I had lying around. In this post, I’ll share you with some impressions, ideas, pains and speculations.
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Tweaking Windows Azure Web Sites
A while ago, I was at a customer who wanted to run his own WebDAV server (using www.sabredav.org) on Windows Azure Web Sites. After some testing, it seemed that this PHP-based WebDAV server was missing some configuration at the webserver level. Some HTTP keywords required for the WebDAV protocol were not mapped to the PHP runtime making it virtually impossible to run a custom WebDAV implementation on PHP. Unless there’s some configuration possible… I’ve issued a simple phpinfo(); on Windows Azure Websites, simply outputting the PHP configuration and all available environment variables in Windows Azure Websites. This revealed the following interesting environment variable:
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Setting up a webfarm using Windows Azure Virtual Machines
With the release of Microsoft’s Windows Azure Virtual Machines, a bunch of new scenarios became available on their cloud platform. If you plan to host multiple web applications, you can either go with Windows Azure Web Sites or go with a webfarm you create using the new IaaS capabilities. The first is okay for any type of application, the latter may be suitable when running a large-scale web application that can not be deployed easily in the PaaS offering. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to build a webfarm with (free!) load balancing.
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Use NuGet Package Restore to avoid pushing assemblies to Windows Azure Websites
Windows Azure Websites allows you to publish a web site in ASP.NET, PHP, Node, … to Windows Azure by simply pushing your source code to a TFS or Git repository. But how does Windows Azure Websites manage dependencies? Do you have to check-in your assemblies and NuGet packages into source control? How about no… NuGet 1.6 shipped with a great feature called NuGet Package Restore. This feature lets you use NuGet packages without adding them to your source code repository. When your solution is built by Visual Studio (or MSBuild, which is used in Windows Azure Websites), a build target calls nuget.exe to make sure any missing packages are automatically fetched and installed before the code is compiled. This helps you keep your source repo small by keeping large packages out of version control.
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The world is changing: the future of IT
I’ve had my say on cloud and the new world of IT already in an earlier post, Predictions for the future. Today, I’m seeing signs the world is in fact starting to change. Sites like Instagram started small and grew big in no time. Were the founders IT wonders? No. And you don’t have to be. Not so long ago, it would have taken you a lot of time and resources to get your idea up and running on the Internet. Especially if it required multiple datacenters and scalability. You would have to deploy a bunch of servers and make sure you had an agile IT environment in place in order to get things running and keep things flexible, a key requirement for many startups but also for large organizations.
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Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network
As you know, Windows Azure is a very rich platform. Next to compute and storage, it offers a series of building blocks that simplify your life as a cloud developer. One of these building blocks is the content delivery network (CDN), which can be used for offloading content to a globally distributed network of servers, ensuring faster throughput to your end users. I’ve been asked to write an article on this matter, which I did, and which is live at ACloudyPlace.com since today. As a small teaser, here’s the first section of it:
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Protecting Windows Azure Web and Worker roles from malware
Most IT administrators will install some sort of virus scanner on your precious servers. Since the cloud, from a technical perspective, is just a server, why not follow that security best practice on Windows Azure too? It has gone by almost unnoticed, but last week Microsoft released the Microsoft Endpoint Protection for Windows Azure Customer Technology Preview. For the sake of bandwidth, I’ll be referring to it as EP. EP offers real-time protection, scheduled scanning, malware remediation (a fancy word for quarantining), active protection and automatic signature updates. Sounds a lot like Microsoft Endpoint Protection or Windows Security Essentials? That’s no coincidence: EP is a Windows Azurified version of it.
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TechDays Finland - Architectural Patterns for the Cloud - NuGet
As promised, here are the slide decks for the two sessions delivered at TechDays Finland last week. The promise of all cloud vendors out there is they can run your applications without changes. While that claim is true, it’s better to optimize existing software or design specifically for the cloud when moving or building an application. Architectural optimization will speed up your application, make it more scalable and even will make it cheaper to run on Windows Azure. This session will take you along some common patterns that are easy to implement and will make your cloud more sunny.
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How do you synchronize a million to-do lists?
Not this question, but a similar one, has been asked by one of our customers. An interesting question, isn’t it? Wait. It gets more interesting. I’ll sketch a fake scenario that’s similar to our customer’s question. Imagine you are building mobile applications to manage a simple to-do list. This software is available on Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone 7 and via a web browser. One day, the decision to share to-do lists has been made. Me and my wife should be able to share one to-do list between us, having an up-to-date version of the list on every device we grant access to this to-do list. Now imagine there are a million of those groups, where every partner in the sync relationship has the latest version of the list on his device. In often a disconnected world. How would you solve this?
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Using SignalR to broadcast a slide deck
Last week, I’ve discussed Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue). We’ve seen that when building web applications, you often face the fact that HTTP, the foundation of the web, is a request/response protocol. A client issues a request, a server handles this request and sends back a response. All the time, with no relation between the first request and subsequent requests. Also, since it’s request-based, there is no way to send messages from the server to the client without having the client create a request first.