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 →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 →