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Azure

A 45-post collection

Fail fast when the cloud fails you

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...

Stories from the trenches: Sizing and penny pinching with Azure websites

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...

Understanding Azure website auto-scale magic

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...

Azure WebJobs are awesome and you should start using them right now!

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...

Automating web hosting creation in Azure with PowerShell

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...

Applied Azure: Infographic of how “Have I been pwned?” orchestrates Microsoft’s cloud services

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...

Success by a thousand cuts: Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and SQL Azure

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...

Disabling SSL 3 in Azure websites (and why it doesn’t look like you have)

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...

Your Azure website CPU is going nuts and it’s not your fault

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...

10 things I learned about rapidly scaling websites with Azure

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 the traffic pattern that cloud pundits the world over sell the value proposition of elastic scale on: This is Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com] (HIBP) going from a fairly constant ~100 sessions an hour to… 12,000 an hour. Almost immediately. This is what h...