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 →These days we all want to build the next big thing which will be deployed across the world. This of course is all fun and games, but there are also some technical difficulties you have to overcome when creating a software platform which has to be available from everywhere in the world with a responsive interface.
One of these difficulties you will have to face is getting the required data near your customers.
Read more →For our automated deployments we have several Azure Organizational accounts in place. These are created within the Azure Active Directory.
Because these accounts are meant for services, we don’t want them to inherit the default password policy for renewing their passwords every X days. Lucky for us, you can configure this via PowerShell. A short how-to is written on MSDN.
The thing that isn’t written (or referenced) over there is how to run the MSOL cmdlets.
Read more →The past couple of days I’ve had the pleasure to start using a Git server as the new version control system at my customer. I’ve already had the pleasure to use GitHub and BitBucket in the past, which works like a charm with tools like GitHub for Windows and SourceTree. Because I’m used to using these tools, I really wanted to use them on my day job also.
Because we chose to use SSH keys as a validation mechanism I had to create one.
Read more →While creating the PowerShell scripts for automatic deployment of the project’s Azure environment I discovered there are multiple Azure PowerShell modules.
When you want to manage a single resource, such as storage accounts, websites, databases, virtual machines, and media services, you need the (default) Azure module. However, when you need to manage resource groups, you will need the AzureResourceManager module.
This is useful information if you want to deploy new Azure websites with a specific hosting plan, like Basic or Standard.
Read more →There are quite a couple of Azure cmdlets made available by Microsoft. All of this sweetness can be installed on your system via the Web Platform Installer. After installing these modules you can start managing your Azure subscription in PowerShell scripts.
Most of the stuff for managing your Azure subscription is implemented in these Azure cmdlets. One of the things which isn’t implemented (yet) is managing the Service Busses in your subscription.
Read more →The project I’m working on at the moment has a lot of analytics data. This means there’s a lot of inserts and updates in the database and queries have to be fast! At the moment all of this is hosted in a single MS SQL Server which does a pretty decent job. Still, this seems like a perfect scenario to introduce a noSQL database, especially as we are migrating to the cloud to improve performance of the application as a whole.
Read more →About 1.5 years ago I received my Nokia Lumia 925 phone as a replacement for my Nokia Lumia 620, which I had lost. I couldn’t be more happy at that moment. It has a great screen, it’s quite fast and nice to look at.
The only downside was, it sometimes rebooted while I was doing something. This happened almost all the time when I was taking a picture, but also when listening to podcasts, driving my car, reading e-mail, etc.
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