Highly Available deployment and availability pattern for heritage Windows applications on AWS

14th of May, 2018 / / No Comments

Quite often I am presented with the challenge of deploying Windows COTS applications onto the AWS platform with a need to requirement for taking advantage of cloud native patterns like auto-scaling and auto-healing. In this blog post I’m going to describe how I’ve used Auto Scaling Groups, Load Balancers, Cloudwatch Alarms and Route 53 to provide a self healing implementation for a heritage COTS Windows application. This pattern was also extended to use lifecycle hooks to support a Blue/Green deployment with zero downtime.… [Keep reading] “Highly Available deployment and availability pattern for heritage Windows applications on AWS”

Azure Internal Load Balancing – Setting Distribution Mode

23rd of June, 2015 / / 3 Comments

I’m going to start by saying that I totally missed that the setting of distribution mode on Azure’s Internal Load Balancer (ILB) service is possible. This is mostly because you don’t set the distribution mode at the ILB level – you set it at the Endpoint level (which in hindsight makes sense because that’s how you do it for the public load balancing too).

There is an excellent blog on the Azure site that covers distribution modes for public load balancing and the good news is that they also apply to internal load balancing as well.… [Keep reading] “Azure Internal Load Balancing – Setting Distribution Mode”

Hybrid Exchange Connectivity with Azure Traffic Manager

31st of March, 2015 / / 3 Comments

Does your exchange hybrid architecture need to have redundancy? How about an active/passive solution using Azure Traffic Manager elimating the need for a HLB device in your DMZ.

Currently there is a few topologies for configuring Hybrid Exchange with Office 365;

  1. Single Hybrid Server
  2. 2+ Hybrid Server behind a load balancer
  3. 2+ Hybrid Server with DNS round robin

A simple solution to make a redundant Hybrid Exchange design without using a HLB is to leverage Azure Traffic Manager to monitor and service the DNS namespace configured in on-premises Exchange and Office 365 configuration.… [Keep reading] “Hybrid Exchange Connectivity with Azure Traffic Manager”