Getting Started with Office 365 Video

21st of November, 2014 / / 1 Comment

Starting Tuesday November 18 Microsoft started rolling out Office 365 Video to customers who have opted in to the First Release programme (if you haven’t you will need to wait a little longer!)

Kloud has built video solutions on Office 365 in the past so it’s great to see Microsoft deliver this as a native feature of SharePoint Online – and one that leverages the underlying power of Azure Media Services capabilities for video cross-encoding and dynamic packaging.… [Keep reading] “Getting Started with Office 365 Video”

Kloud Sessions from TechEd Australia 2014

7th of November, 2014 / / No Comments

Consultants from Kloud are always looking for ways to help public cloud adoption by contributing to community events and sharing our knowledge. The premier annual Microsoft technical event to do this at in Australia is TechEd.

As in previous years Kloud had speakers presenting at TechEd 2014 and you’ll find their session videos below. Click through to the Channel 9 site to gain access to the deck to go with the session.

Azure VM Security and Compliance Management with Configuration Manager and SCM

Presenter: Andreas Wasita.… [Keep reading] “Kloud Sessions from TechEd Australia 2014”

Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 2

4th of November, 2014 / / 2 Comments

In the first post in this series we setup our scenario and looked at how we can build out an ultra highly available Azure SQL Database layer for our applications. In this second post we’ll go through setting up the MVC Web Application we want to deploy so that it can leverage the capabilities of the Azure platform.

MVC project changes

This is actually pretty straight forward – you can take the sample MVC project from Codeplex and apply these changes easily.… [Keep reading] “Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 2”

Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 1

3rd of November, 2014 / / 2 Comments

As public cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure mature it is becoming easier to build deployment architectures that are substantially resilient to faults in cloud platforms that are increasingly unlikely to ever eventuate due to the previously mentioned maturity!

We’ll take a look at how we can deploy an ultra highly available database-backed ASP.Net MVC Website using Microsoft Azure across this post and my next one.

Desired State

The diagram below shows what we will be aiming to achieve with our setup.… [Keep reading] “Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 1”

How to find out if your Azure Subscription can use the Australian Regions

27th of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

Today’s a great day to be looking to move services to the public cloud in Australia with Microsoft announcing the availability of their local Microsoft Azure Australian Geography.

… [Keep reading] “How to find out if your Azure Subscription can use the Australian Regions”

Logging with log4net and Azure Diagnostics on Web and Worker Roles

22nd of October, 2014 / / 11 Comments

Once you start publishing content to Azure Cloud Services it becomes increasingly critical to have insights into what is going on with your Web or Worker Roles without the need to manually connect to the hosts and inspect local logs.

Logging locally to file is an option but results in a couple of challenges: there is limited local persistent disk space on an Azure Role and local logging makes it hard to get an aggregated view of what’s happening across multiple Instances servicing a single Cloud Service.… [Keep reading] “Logging with log4net and Azure Diagnostics on Web and Worker Roles”

Fix: Azure Cloud Services Error: No deployments were found. Http Status Code: NotFound

21st of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

If you find yourself having to move existing .Net solutions to Microsoft Azure you may come across an initial deployment issue if you add a Cloud Service Project type to your existing application and then publish it to a new Azure Cloud Service using Visual Studio. It’s not immediately obvious what the source of the issue is so let’s take a look at how we can troubleshoot the source of the problem.

Visual Studio provides you with the vanilla error message “Error: No deployments were found.… [Keep reading] “Fix: Azure Cloud Services Error: No deployments were found. Http Status Code: NotFound”

Fix: unable to delete an Azure Storage Container due to a lease.

20th of October, 2014 / / 8 Comments

A quick tip for anyone who gets stuck when trying to delete an Azure Blob Storage Container that appears to be empty but upon deletion generates the following helpful error message

There is currently a lease on the container and no lease ID was specified in the request…

You’ve looked and there are no VHD or other objects appearing in this Container and you have found that you are unable to change the lease settings on the Container (yes, you can read them but you can’t update or remove them).… [Keep reading] “Fix: unable to delete an Azure Storage Container due to a lease.”

Manage Azure Resources Using Tags

14th of October, 2014 / / 4 Comments

A feature request for quite some time in the Microsoft Azure space has been the ability to group individual resources such as websites and databases so that they can be grouped and managed as part of a single solution or system. In this post we’ll take a look at what has been introduced so far through 2014 to meet these needs.

Say Hello to Azure Resource Manager

The first piece of the solution to these requests was the introduction of the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) way back at Build 2014 along with the new Azure Preview Portal which offers support for Resource Groups.… [Keep reading] “Manage Azure Resources Using Tags”

How to fix 403 errors when managing Azure SQL Database from Visual Studio

8th of September, 2014 / / No Comments

I was recently trying to manage Azure SQL Databases via Visual Studio in a new Azure subscription and was unable to open the SQL Databases node at all and received the following error message.

Screenshot of Visual Studio error dialog.

The text reads:

Error 0: Failed to retrieve all server data for subscription ‘GUID’ due to error ‘Error code: 403 Message: The server failed to authenticate the request. Verify that the certificate is valid and is associated with this subscription.’.

and my Server Explorer window looked like this:

How Server Explorer Looked

I must admit that I don’t often manage my Azure assets via Visual Studio so it had been a while since I’d used this tooling.… [Keep reading] “How to fix 403 errors when managing Azure SQL Database from Visual Studio”