Inside Azure – Deployment workflow with Fabric Controller and Red Dog Front End

5th of May, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Abstracting complexities around developing, deploying and maintaining software applications have diminished the importance of understanding underlying architecture. While this may work well for today’s aggressive delivery cycles, at the same time, it impacts the ability of engineers to build an efficient, optimal solution which aligns with the internal architecture of the hosting platform. Architects and engineers should be cognizant of the architecture of the hosting environment to better design a system. The same holds good for Microsoft Azure as a hosting provider.… [Keep reading] “Inside Azure – Deployment workflow with Fabric Controller and Red Dog Front End”

WebHook your WebJob – With Visual Studio Team Services integration example

26th of April, 2016 / / No Comments

WebHooks, also known as ‘HTTP(S) call backs’ are becoming very popular for reporting asynchronous events to trigger business workflows. The latest release of Microsoft Azure WebJobs can now be triggered using WebHooks. In this post I will cover the configuration of a WebJob to use a WebHook as a trigger using a sample scenario of integrating a WebJob with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to explain the workflow.

Support for WebHooks is packaged as an extension to WebJobs and is currently in a pre-release state.… [Keep reading] “WebHook your WebJob – With Visual Studio Team Services integration example”

Highly available WordPress deployment on Azure

15th of March, 2016 / / 8 Comments

WordPress is the leading content management system today owning more than 50% of the market share. WordPress on Microsoft Azure is becoming a very popular offering with the ability to host WordPress as an Azure WebApp. While Microsoft has made the process of spinning up a WordPress site very easy with built in gallery images, running business critical applications on a cloud platform also introduces challenges in terms on availability and scalability.

WordPress Architecture

A typical WordPress deployment consists of the following two tiers:

  • Web Frontend – PHP web site
  • Backend Data store
    • Relational data store – Hierarchical entity store
    • Object data store – Used to store uploaded images and other artefacts

In order to guarantee high availability and scalability, we need to ensure that each of these service tiers are decoupled and can be separately managed.… [Keep reading] “Highly available WordPress deployment on Azure”

Azure WebJob logs demystified

14th of March, 2016 / / 4 Comments

Asynchronous jobs are usually hard to troubleshoot due to the very nature of its execution. This post talks about how we can monitor and trouble shoot Azure WebJobs both during development and when it is deployed on an Azure Web App. The key is to understand the layout of the logs the WebJob runtime creates during its execution.

WebJob storage accounts

To enable logging, WebJob needs two Azure storage account connection strings to be configured:

  • AzureWebJobsDashboard
  • AzureWebJobsStorage

AzureWebJobsDashboard

This storage account is primarily used by Azure WebJob SDK to store logs from the WebJobs Dashboard.… [Keep reading] “Azure WebJob logs demystified”

Cloud Cushioning using Azure Queues

1st of March, 2016 / / 1 Comment

The distributed world

The cloud revolution has revived the importance of distributed computing in today’s enterprise market with the distribution of compute and storage workloads across multiple decoupled resources helping corporates optimise their capital and operational expenditure.

While there are benefits of moving to the cloud, it’s important to understand the ground rules of the cloud platform. Running your business critical services on commodity hardware with a service SLA of three nines (99.9) against five nines (99.999) does call for some precautions.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Cushioning using Azure Queues”

Background business – Azure Worker role Vs Web Job

29th of February, 2016 / / 7 Comments

Importance of asynchronous work loads

Background processes play a key role in enabling distributed asynchronous computing. Background tasks have been used in the past to handle secondary workloads like logging, monitoring, scheduling and notifications, but today’s systems use background processing to improve user experience by decoupling User Interfaces from heavier tasks. Microsoft Azure provides two ways to host background tasks:

  • Worker Roles (PaaS)
  • Web Jobs (API apps. SaaS)

Worker Roles are dedicated virtual machines which can be pictured as an executable unit of work, unlike Web Jobs.… [Keep reading] “Background business – Azure Worker role Vs Web Job”