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 →For quite a couple of years now, the SQL Data Sync software has been available to synchronize data between MS SQL Server databases. This SQL Data Sync however has been decommissioned and we have to resort to the the (new) SQL Data Sync (Preview) nowadays.
SQL Data Sync is a solution/feature which allows you to synchronize data between several SQL (Azure) databases. The best thing is, you don’t have to synchronize your complete database.
Read more →Sometimes you’re hired by a company which is a bit rigorous on blocking outgoing communication. A security consultant would probably agree on this practice, but most developers won’t. Nowadays a lot of services in the cloud operate on different ports. Azure services don’t always operate on port 80 and 443, hosted noSQL providers have connection strings with (seemingly) random ports, etc. It’s not always easy to get approval to open ports in the company firewall, especially if you’re doing some tests and proof of concept projects.
Read more →At the moment I’m working on a (Orchard) project which is deployed to Windows Azure and uses a SQL Azure database. As my team needed to fix some issues which occurred in the Acceptance and Production environment, I wanted to get a recent database dump so we would be able to reproduce the issues on the development machines.
I couldn’t find an easy way to synchronize the databases or create a backup which I could restore.
Read more →