Tag: Webfarm
All the articles with the tag "Webfarm".
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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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Replaying IIS request logs using Apache JMeter
How would you validate a new API is compatible with an old API? While upgrading frameworks in a web application we’re building, that was exactly the question we were asking ourselves. Sure, we could write synthetic tests on each endpoint, but is that representative? Users typically find insane better ways to test an API, so why not replay actual requests against the new API? In this post, we’ll see how we can do exactly this using IIS and Apache JMeter. I’ve been using JMeter quite often in the past years doing web development, as it’s one of the most customizable load test and functional test tools for web applications. The interface is quite spartan, but don’t let that discourage you from using JMeter. After all, this is Sparta!
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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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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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Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)
With the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) released as a preview, I thought it was a good time to write up some details about how to work with it. The CDN can be used for offloading content to a globally distributed network of servers, ensuring faster throughput to your end users. Note: this is a modified and updated version of my article at ACloudyPlace.com roughly two years ago. I have added information on how to work with ASP.NET MVC bundling and the Windows Azure CDN, updated screenshots and so on.
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An autoscaling build farm using TeamCity and Windows Azure
Cloud computing is often referred to as a cost saver due to its billing models. If we can move workloads that are seasonal to the cloud, cost reduction is something that will come. No matter if it’s really “seasonal seasonal” (e.g. a temporary high workload around the holidays) or “daily seasonal” where workloads are different depending on the time of day, these workloads have written cloud all over them.
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Windows Azure Traffic Manager Explained
With yesterday’s announcement on Windows Azure Traffic Manager surfacing in the management portal (as a preview), I thought it was a good moment to recap this more than 2 year old service. Windows Azure Traffic Manager allows you to control the distribution of network traffic to your Cloud Services and VMs hosted within Windows Azure. The Windows Azure Traffic Manager provides several methods of distributing internet traffic among two or more cloud services or VMs, all accessible with the same URL, in one or more Windows Azure datacenters. At its core, it is basically a distributed DNS service that knows which Windows Azure services are sitting behind the traffic manager URL and distributes requests based on three possible profiles:
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Running unit tests when deploying ASP.NET to Windows Azure Web Sites
One of the well-loved features of Windows Azure Web Sites is the fact that you can simply push our ASP.NET application’s source code to the platform using Git (or TFS or DropBox) and that sources are compiled and deployed on your Windows Azure Web Site. If you’ve checked the management portal earlier, you may have noticed that a number of deployment steps are executed: the deployment process searches for the project file to compile, compiles it, copies the build artifacts to the web root and has your website running. But did you know you can customize this process? [update] Mstest seems to work now as well, using the console runner from VS2012.
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Storing user uploads in Windows Azure blob storage
On one of the mailing lists I follow, an interesting question came up: “We want to write a VSTO plugin for Outlook which copies attachments to blob storage. What’s the best way to do this? What about security?”. Shortly thereafter, an answer came around: “That can be done directly from the client. And storage credentials can be encrypted for use in your VSTO plugin.” While that’s certainly a solution to the problem, it’s not the best. Let’s try and answer… The first solution that comes to mind is implementing the following flow: the client authenticates and uploads data to your service which then stores the upload on blob storage.
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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.