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”

API Management Tips & Tricks – Importing Swagger 2.0 Docs

3rd of March, 2016 / / 5 Comments

API Management (APIM) offers many features for consumers to use by providing a unified endpoint. In order to achieve this consolidation, importing existing API definitions is one of its key functionalities. APIM supports both document types in WADL and Swagger to import APIs. In this post, we’re going to discuss what we should know when dealing with Swagger documents.

The Issue

Importing Swagger document into APIM is pretty straight forward by following this Azure document.… [Keep reading] “API Management Tips & Tricks – Importing Swagger 2.0 Docs”

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”

Any device, any platform, one Microsoft

29th of February, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Only a few years ago you’d have been hard pressed to have mentioned the following four words in a single blog post where you weren’t arguing for / against a way of doing things: Microsoft, iOS, Android and development.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you will no doubt have seen Microsoft’s announcement on their intent to acquire Xamarin, a business very much about cross-platform application development.

For those of us working in this space this has really been a case of
“what took you so long?”… [Keep reading] “Any device, any platform, one Microsoft”

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”

Automating the simultaneous deployment of AzureRM Virtual Machines for a development environment

22nd of February, 2016 / / 14 Comments

This post is details my method for automating the creation of AzureRM virtual machines for use in a development environment. I’m using this process to quickly standup an environment for testing configurations on.

In summary this process;

  • parallel creation of the AzureRM Virtual Machines
  • All machines have the same configuration
    • NIC, Disks etc
  • All machines are created in a new Resource Group, with associated Virtual Network

Simultaneous Creating the AzureRM Virtual Machines for MIM 2016

For my MIM 2016 Lab I’m going to create 5 Virtual Machines.… [Keep reading] “Automating the simultaneous deployment of AzureRM Virtual Machines for a development environment”

Using Active Directory Security Groups to Grant Permissions to Azure Resources

18th of February, 2016 / / 4 Comments

The introduction of the Azure Resource Manager platform in Azure continues to expose new possibilities for managing your deployed resources.

One scenario that you may not be aware of is the ability to use scoped RBAC role assignments to grant limited rights to Azure AD-based users and groups.

We know Azure provides us with many built-in RBAC roles, but it may not be immediately obvious that you can control their assignment scope.

What do I mean by this?… [Keep reading] “Using Active Directory Security Groups to Grant Permissions to Azure Resources”

Simultaneously Start|Stop all Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines in a Resource Group

10th of February, 2016 / / 13 Comments

Problem

How many times have you wanted to Start or Stop all Virtual Machines in an Azure Resource Group ? For me it seems to be quite often, especially for development environment resource groups. It’s not that difficult though. You can just enumerate the VM’s then cycle through them and call ‘Start-AzureRMVM’ or ‘Start-AzureRMVM’. However, the more VM’s you have, that approach running serially as PowerShell does means it can take quite some time to complete.… [Keep reading] “Simultaneously Start|Stop all Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines in a Resource Group”

Microsoft Azure Stack is the New Hybrid Cloud

4th of February, 2016 / / No Comments

Last week Microsoft released the public technical preview of new Azure Stack. Azure Stack, along with its predecessor Windows Azure Pack, gives anyone the ability to extend Azure management capabilities to their on-premises datacentre.

Firstly, a bit of background.

With Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft made available Windows Azure Pack. Azure Pack offered an on-premise integration point between Windows Server, System Centre, and SQL Server to offer a self-service portal and private cloud services including virtual machine provisioning and management (IaaS), database as a services (DBaaS), and scalable web application hosting (PaaS).… [Keep reading] “Microsoft Azure Stack is the New Hybrid Cloud”