Reducing the size of an Azure Web Role deployment package

28th of October, 2014 / / 7 Comments

If you’ve been working with Azure Web Roles and deployed them to an Azure subscription, you likely have noticed the substantial size of a simple web role deployment package. Even with the vanilla ASP.NET sample website the deployment package seems to be quite bloated. This is not such a problem if you have decent upload bandwidth, but in Australia bandwidth is scarce like water in the desert so let’s see if we can compress this deployment package a little bit.… [Keep reading] “Reducing the size of an Azure Web Role deployment package”

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”

Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator – Part III Scaling Out

22nd of October, 2014 / / 3 Comments

There’s recently been some interest in the space of accelerating Office 365 SharePoint Online traffic for organisations and for good reason. All it takes is a CEO to send out an email to All Staff with a link to a movie hosted in SharePoint Online to create some interest in better ways to serve content internally. There are commercial solutions to this problem, but they are, well… commercial (read expensive). Now that the basic functionality has been proven using existing Windows Server components, what would it take to put into production?… [Keep reading] “Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator – Part III Scaling Out”

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”

Deploy Hardened HA-Proxy Azure VM from VM Depot (Microsoft Open Technologies)

10th of October, 2014 / / No Comments

In this post, we will discuss how to deploy various VM image developed by community from VM Depot (Microsoft Open Technologies).

Microsoft Azure Cross Platform Command Line (X-Plat CLI)

I blogged Microsoft Azure Cross Platform Command Line previously. This post will continue to explore Microsoft dedication on Open-Source technologies.

Firstly let’s prepare quickly our tools to run Azure X-Plat CLI:

1. I am using my Windows machine. I run my Azure Command Prompt or You can use node.js… [Keep reading] “Deploy Hardened HA-Proxy Azure VM from VM Depot (Microsoft Open Technologies)”

Kloud delivers infrastructure reforms for one of SA’s largest privately-owned companies

19th of September, 2014 / / No Comments

Customer Overview

Cavpower is one of South Australia’s largest privately-owned companies and has been the dealer for the supply, service and maintenance of Caterpillar equipment in SA and Broken Hill since 1972. They provide equipment sales and product support to the mining, quarry, local government, building/heavy construction, power generation, industrial services, petroleum, road transport, waste management, forestry and marine industries.

Business Situation

Cavpower self-manage the majority of their ICT in-house. The company’s infrastructure is largely centralised with core servers and infrastructure hosted on–premises at their head office. … [Keep reading] “Kloud delivers infrastructure reforms for one of SA’s largest privately-owned companies”

Department uses cloud-based technologies to enable its ‘ICT as a service’ strategy

11th of September, 2014 / / No Comments

Customer Overview

The Department of State Development and Infrastructure Planning (DSDIP) plays a critical role in leading a state-wide, coordinated approach to infrastructure, planning and development whilst ensuring a sustainable future for Queensland communities.

The Department of Local Government, Community Recovery and Resilience (DLGCRR) is responsible for overseeing the legislative framework in which local governments operate and enhance community recovery and future resilience.

Business Situation

The Department of State Development and Infrastructure Planning was using an externally hosted Microsoft Exchange 2003 environment for their email.… [Keep reading] “Department uses cloud-based technologies to enable its ‘ICT as a service’ strategy”

How to create custom images for use in Microsoft Azure

10th of September, 2014 / / No Comments

In this post I will discuss how we can create custom virtual machine images and deploy them to the Microsoft Azure platform. To complete this process you will need an Azure Subscription, the Azure PowerShell module installed and a pre-prepared VHD which you would like to use (VHDX is not supported at present.)

You can sign up for a free trial of Microsoft Azure here if you don’t currently hold a subscription.

Completing this process will allow you take advantage of platforms which aren’t offered “out of the box” on Microsoft Azure eg, Server 2003 and Server 2008 for testing and development.… [Keep reading] “How to create custom images for use in Microsoft Azure”