Tag: Scalability
All the articles with the tag "Scalability".
-
Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue)
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.
-
Rewriting WCF OData Services base URL with load balancing & reverse proxy
When scaling out an application to multiple servers, often a form of load balancing or reverse proxying is used to provide external users access to a web server. For example, one can be in the situation where two servers are hosting a WCF OData Service and are exposed to the Internet through either a load balancer or a reverse proxy. Below is a figure of such setup using a reverse proxy. As you can see, the external server listens on the URL www.example.com, while both internal servers are listening on their respective host names. Guess what: whenever someone accesses a WCF OData Service through the reverse proxy, the XML generated by one of the two backend servers is slightly invalid:
-
Running Memcached on Windows Azure for PHP
After three conferences in two weeks with a lot of “airport time”, which typically converts into “let’s code!” time, I think I may have tackled a commonly requested Windows Azure feature for PHP developers. Some sort of distributed caching is always a great thing to have when building scalable services and applications. While Windows Azure offers a distributed caching layer under the form of the Windows Azure Caching, that components currently lacks support for non-.NET technologies. I’ve heard there’s work being done there, but that’s not very interesting if you are building your app today. This blog post will show you how to modify a Windows Azure deployment to run and use Memcached in the easiest possible manner.
-
Why MyGet uses Windows Azure
Recently one of the Tweeps following me started fooling around and hit one of my sweet spots: Windows Azure. Basically, he mocked me for using Windows Azure for MyGet, a website with enough users but not enough to justify the “scalability” aspect he thought Windows Azure was offering. Since Windows Azure is much, much more than scalability alone, I decided to do a quick writeup about the various reasons on why we use Windows Azure for MyGet. And those are not scalability. First of all, here’s a high-level overview of our deployment, which may illustrate some of the aspects below:
-
Book review: Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook
Over the past few months, I’ve been doing technical reviewing for a great Windows Azure book: the Windows Azure Development Cookbook published by Packt. During this review I had no idea who the author of the book was but after publishing it seems the author is no one less than my fellow Windows Azure MVP Neil Mackenzie! If you read his blog you should know you should immediately buy this book. Why? Well, Neil usually goes both broad and deep: all required context for understanding a recipe is given and the recipe itself goes deep enough to know most of the ins and outs of a specific feature of Windows Azure. Well written, to the point and clear to every reader both novice and expert.
-
Windows Azure Accelerator for Web Roles
One of the questions I often get around Windows Azure is: “Is Windows Azure interesting for me?”. It’s a tough one, because most of the time when someone asks that question they currently already have a server somewhere that hosts 100 websites. In the full-fledged Windows Azure model, that would mean 100 x 2 (we want the SLA) = 200 Windows Azure instances. And a stroke at the end of the month when the bill arrives. Microsoft’s DPE team have released something very interesting for those situations though: the Windows Azure Accelerator for Web Roles.
-
A first look at Windows Azure AppFabric Applications
After the Windows Azure AppFabric team announced the availability of Windows Azure AppFabric Applications (preview), I signed up for early access immediately and got in. After installing the tools and creating a namespace through the portal, I decided to give it a try to see what it’s all about. Note that Neil Mackenzie also has an extensive post on “WAAFapps” which I recommend you to read as well. Before answering that question, let’s have a brief look at what Windows Azure is today. According to Microsoft, Windows Azure is a “PaaS” (Platform-as-a-Service) offering. What that means is that Windows Azure offers a series of platform components like compute, storage, caching, authentication, a service bus, a database, a CDN, … to your applications.
-
Geographically distributing Windows Azure applications using Traffic Manager
With the downtime of Amazon EC2 this week, it seems a lot of websites “in the cloud” are down at the moment. Most comments I read on Twitter (and that I also made, jokingly :-)) are in the lines of “outrageous!” and “don’t go cloud!”. While I understand these comments, I think they are wrong. These “clouds” can fail. They are even designed to fail, and often provide components and services that allow you to cope with these failures. You just have to expect failure at some point in time and build it into your application.
-
Official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app released
I’m proud to announce that we (RealDolmen) have released the official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app! The official Belgium TechDays 2011 gives you the ability to browse current & upcoming sessions, as well as provide LIVE feedback to the event organizers. Is the current session awesome? Let us know! Is the food too spicy? Let us know!
-
Windows Azure and scaling: how? (PHP)
One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fact that there is great opportunity in scaling, even for small applications. In this blog post series, I will talk about the following: In order to keep things DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself), I’ll just link you to the previous post (Windows Azure and scaling: how? (.NET)) for this one. For PHP however, you’ll be needing a .pem certificate. Again, for the lazy, here’s mine (management.pfx (4.05 kb), management.cer (1.18 kb) and management.pem (5.11 kb)). If you want to create one yourself, check this site where you can convert and generate certificates.