One of the reasons for me to create an Azure virtual network is being able to connect to my development machines in the Cloud from anywhere, without exposing them to the public. In order to do so, all machines have to be added to the virtual network. You also have to select the option to set up a point-to-site VPN connection to the virtual network.
Setting up a point-to-site VPN connection to an Azure virtual network is documented quite well on the Azure documentation pages.
Read more →Nowadays it’s possible to create virtual networks within your Azure subscription. This can be very useful for managing your Azure resources within a specific network or setting up a point-to-site or site-to-site connection to expand your current on-premise network.
To me creating a virtual network sounds like a great way to manage my virtual machines and services for development purposes which I’m running within Azure. It will also let me connect to them without exposing stuff to the public internet.
Read more →In my previous post I’ve talked about creating new projects in Octopus Deploy in order to deploy projects to different environments. In this post I’ll explain a bit on how to create Octopus Deploy packages for your Visual Studio projects via Teamcity.
To enable packaging for Octopus you’ll need to include the Octopack NuGet package to the project you are packaging. In my case this will be the Worker project since I’m only working with Microsoft Azure solutions at the moment.
Read more →The latest project I was working on didn’t have a continuous integration and continuous deployment environment set up yet. Creating a continuous integration environment was rather easy as we were already using Teamcity and adding a couple of builds isn’t much of a problem. The next logical step would be to start setting up continuous deployment.
I started out by scripting a lot of PowerShell to manage our Azure environment like creating all SQL servers, databases, service busses, cloud services, etc.
Read more →In my previous post I’ve described how to use Application Insights and use it within your new web application. Most of us aren’t working in a greenfield project, so new solutions have to be integrated with the old.
The project I’m working on uses log4net for logging messages, exceptions, etc. In order for us to use Application Insights, we had to search for a solution to integrate both. After having done some research on the subject we discovered this wasn’t a big problem.
Read more →Some time ago the Application Insights became available as a preview in the Azure portal. Application Insights helps you monitor the state of an application, server, clients, etc. As said, it’s still in preview, but it’s rather stable and very easy to use and implement in your applications.
The documentation is still being worked on, but with all the getting started guides on the Microsoft site you can kick start your project with it in a couple of minutes.
Read more →Once you have set up your sharding solution with a fully configured Shard Map Manager, modified your data access layer to use Elastic Scale, added fault handling and running your stuff in production, there will be a time when you are in need to split, merge or move shardlets between shards.
This is where the Elastic Scale Split Merge tool comes in place. The team has created a nice web application which will enable you to do this kind of management.
Read more →There are quite a lot of differences between having an on-premise data center and using the cloud. One of these differences is the (guaranteed) uptime and the latency between the different servers. When creating your local on-premise datacenter you will have a pretty stable network connection between the different servers and it’s probably really fast. The cloud can be pretty fast also, especially when you are located in the same datacenter/container.
Read more →Now that you have configured Elastic Scale for your solution there are still some changes to be made in your application.
At the moment there are 2 sample applications available, one using plain old SQL-queries (ADO.NET) and another one using the Entity Framework. I would suggest checking out these samples before doing any serious Elastic Scale work.
You will probably notice there are some small differences between the ADO.NET sample and the Entity Framework sample.
Read more →When implementing a sharding solution, you will need something which knows in what shard a specific shardlet exists. This is something you will want to store in a single location, so you know for sure you are always using the most recent information. When using the Elastic Scale libraries this is called the Shard Map Manager. The Shard Map Manager keeps track of the location & state of the shardlets and shards.
Read more →