Azure

Let’s just get this out of the way early – Azure is awesome. No really, I am continually blown away by the stuff you can do with it, how cheaply you can do it and just how much it changes the conversation you can have with those you’re delivering solution to using Microsoft’s cloud. This is not an endorsement based on my affinity for Microsoft nor is it constructed from what I read or see at talks, it’s based on my own firsthand experiences delivering real world software on the platform. I’ve b...

It’s never real nice waking up to something like this: This was Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com] (HIBP) first thing my Saturday morning. The outage was accompanied by a great many automated email notifications and manual reminders from concerned citizens that my site was indeed, down. Having my Azure showcase site down at the very same moment as my Pluralsight course on Azure was launched – Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service [http://www.pluralsight.com/c...

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure]How much capacity will you need for your app? Or asked another way if wearing the vendor hat, how much money ya got? We’re generally lousy at estimating infrastructure capacity requirements and even when a more scientific approach is taken (and it’s frequently not), we’re still l...

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure]I was helping out a consumer of Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) earlier today as they were trying to build up a profile of the pwnage state of their client base. This mean firing a heap of requests at the API [https://haveibeenpwned.com/API/v2] so that they...

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure]No really, they’re totally awesome! I used Azure WebJobs [http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/websites-dotnet-webjobs-sdk-get-started/] in the very early days and whilst they served a purpose, I wasn’t blown away with them at the time. In fact I went on to use...

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure] Here’s your situation: you’ve got a heap of websites on traditional hosting models. Shared tenancies on single logical machines, dedicated infrastructure or even worse, not really any idea because you just keep paying that $5 per month and stuff works. Most of the time. But you’v...

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure] Remember the good old days when a website used to be nothing more than a bunch of files on a web server and a database back end? Life was simple, easy to manage and gloriously inefficient. Wait – what? That’s right, all we had was a hammer and we consequently treated every challen...

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure]It seems like every time I turn around there’s something I haven’t seen in Azure. If I’m honest, it leaves me in a perpetual state of “Oh man, there is so much stuff I don’t know”. I suspect that resonates with many readers of this blog because there’s just so much stuff to keep on...

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure]Just a quick one as it’s mostly explained in How to Disable SSL 3.0 in Azure Websites, Roles, and Virtual Machines [http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/10/19/how-to-disable-ssl-3-0-in-azure-websites-roles-and-virtual-machines/] , but there are a few bits worth adding. Oh – just in...

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure]This is not what you want to see on your Azure website: Ok, so what are we looking at here? CPU goes up and up and up and then… dramatically down. There are even some additional coloured lines in the middle of that graph indicating that there were more instances put on just to d...