Contents tagged with Azure
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The blessing and leaky abstraction of Azure App Service
It's hard to believe that it has already been over eight years since I migrated all of my goodies from a dedicated server to Azure. For the most part, I'm thankful for this arrangement because maintaining your own hardware isn't something I ever enjoyed or wanted to do. Having a single box was always asking for failure, too, even though I had an extra drive in the thing (which did fail once) as a backup. I couldn't respond to scale needs if I had to either, and there was one point where it would have helped. Meanwhile, Azure has improved in a lot of ways since then as far as pricing structures go. The SQL database pools were a real game changer for me, because it works with the same flexibility as app services, which all live on the same "plan" with whatever memory and CPU constraints you're paying for. The database uses some goofy units, but whatever they are, I rarely average more than 5% of them.
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POP Forums, the product launch retrospective
At some point over the last six weeks and change, I launched POP Forums as a commercial, hosted product. By that I mean, it was something I could sell to others. I'm not suggesting that I've done any real sales effort, obvs, because I don't have any external customer yet. But there was a lot to learn from the effort.
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Amazing custom metrics using Azure Application Insights
You know that old management saying, that you can't improve what you don't measure? It's annoying because being measured feels personal and uncomfortable, but it's useful in technology because it's totally true. There is a fairly lucrative market around monitoring stuff in the cloud now, because as our systems become more distributed and less monolithic, we do less tracing at the code level and more digestion of interaction data between components.
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Using Azure DevOps pipelines for cloud-hosted POP Forums
Last week I did my first production deployment of the cloud-hosted version of POP Forums. I'm really excited to offer a version that others can use without setting it up themselves (I'm really excited about the performance, too!). If you've followed me for any length of time, you know that I've been maintaining POP Forums as an open source project since around 2003. The new cloud-hosted version is about 95% the same code, with a few substitutions in the dependency injection container to facilitate multi-tenancy, especially in the asynchronous Azure Functions to make sure that they're acting on behalf of the right tenant. What I'm excited to share is that it's so easy to use the output of the open source project and get those bits into the commercial product.
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Adventures in load testing
I'm at a point now where POP Forums is mostly ported to ASP.NET Core, and I'm super happy with it. I've done some minor tweaks here and there, but mostly it's the "old" code running in the context of the new framework. I mentioned before that my intention is not to really add a ton of features for this release, but I do want to make it capable of scaling out, which is to say run on multiple nodes. I haven't done any real sniffing on SQL performance or anything, but I noticed that I had some free, simple load testing available as part of my free-level Visual Studio Team Services account, so that seemed convenient.
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Another Azure outage, and why regional failover isn't straight forward
[This is a repost from my personal blog.]
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My last big Azure problem: The unexplained CPU spike
Over the last year and change, I've written a number of posts about the challenges around moving my sites (primarily CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz) to Azure. These are moderately busy sites that can for the most part live in a small websites, er, app service, instance, with SQL Azure S0 for the data, some storage here and there, queues, and some experimental use of search, Redis and what not. I know I've done some complaining, but only because I really want one of the core premises of the cloud, namely for all of the maintenance and backend stuff to be abstracted away, to deliver without me thinking about it. Mostly, it has.
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One year with sites in Azure
My sites (CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz) have now been in Azure for about a year. It has been interesting, for sure. From a high altitude perspective, I can tell you that I've saved money when compared to renting a dedicated server, but there have been challenges in terms of reliability.
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The great Azure outage of 2014
We had some downtime on Tuesday night for our sites, about two hours or so. On one hand, November is the slowest month for the sites anyway, but on the flip side, we pushed a new version of PointBuzz that I wanted to monitor, and I did post a few photos from IAAPA that were worthy of discussion. It doesn't matter either way, because the sites were down and there was nothing I can do about it because of a serious failure in protocol with Microsoft's Azure platform.
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I moved my Web sites to Azure. You won't believe what happened next!
TL;DR: I eventually saved money.