Tag: Webfarm
All the articles with the tag "Webfarm".
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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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GitHub for Windows Azure Websites
With the new release of Windows Azure and Windows Azure Websites, a lot of new scenarios with Windows Azure just became possible. One I like a lot, especially since Appharbor and Heroku have similar offers too, is the possibility to push source code (ASP.NET or PHP) to Windows Azure instead of binaries using Windows Azure Websites. Not everyone out there is a command-line here though: if you want to use Git as a mechanism of pushing sources to Windows Azure Websites chances are you may go crazy if you are unfamiliar with command-line git commands. Luckily, a couple of weeks ago, GitHub released GitHub for Windows. It features an easy-to-use GUI on top of GitHub repositories. And with a small trick also on top of Windows Azure Websites.
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Ready for a Windows Azure roadtrip?
A while ago, Michelangelo van Dam (a hardcore PHP guy), François Hertay (a hardcore Java guru) and myself (a .NET guy) were asked if we wanted to write about some of our experiences with the Windows Azure platform. Starting next week, you’ll find about 3 blog posts per week and/or videos on Windows Azure (both a getting started level as well as some fun advanced posts) on a freshly released website: www.azure-roadtrip.be. I have the honour of kicking off a series of blog posts on .NET, starting with a level 100 one: the what & why of Windows Azure for .NET developers.
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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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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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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:
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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.