Advanced features of Azure Storage

Azure Stor­age of­fers many use­ful fea­tures and ser­vices which make in­te­gra­tion into ex­ist­ing sys­tems eas­ier. New so­lu­tions can take ad­van­tage of those fea­tures on an ar­chi­tec­tural level. Know­ing which com­mon pat­terns are na­tively sup­ported by Azure Stor­age can ac­cel­er­ate de­vel­op­ment rad­i­cally. Here is an overview of them. Read more ›

An alternative to Let’s Encrypt for Azure Web Apps

The con­fig­ur­ing of Let’s En­crypt cer­tifi­cates for Azure Web Apps was al­ways a pain. One would ex­pect a sim­ple sin­gle-click so­lu­tion. It took four years un­til Mi­crosoft de­liv­ered this fea­ture. It is named App Ser­vice Man­aged Cer­tifi­cates and it will is­sue a cer­tifi­cate for your cus­tom do­mains at no cost. This fea­ture is avai­l­able for cus­tomers with Ba­sic App Ser­vice Plan and above. Naked do­mains or wild­cards are not sup­ported. Read more ›

The growth of Azure datacenters in Europe

Eu­ro­pean com­pa­nies will soon have a much wider of­fer of Azure re­gions. Be­sides 6 cur­rent Azure re­gions in Eu­rope – Am­s­ter­dam (West Eu­rope), Dublin (North Eu­rope), Lon­don (UK South), Cardiff (UK West), Paris (France Cen­tral) and Mar­seille (France South) – an­other 8 re­gions will be avai­l­able. Mi­crosoft will op­er­ate 11 Azure re­gions in North­ern Amer­ica and 14 re­gions in Eu­rope. An­other 13 re­gions are lo­cated in Asia. Read more ›

Upcoming breaking change in Service Fabric 6.5

Re­mov­ing node state will not be pos­si­ble when the node is a seed node since Ser­vice Fab­ric 6.5. It will be nec­es­sary to con­vert the seed node into a non-seed node prior to node state re­moval. It is not yet known how to con­vert seed nodes into non-seed nodes. It will be pos­si­ble opt-out from this lim­i­ta­tion in the clus­ter con­fig­u­ra­tion. De­tailed gui­d­ance will be avai­l­able when the Ser­vice Fab­ric ver­sion 6.5 is re­leased. Read more ›

Working with Azure Batch

Azure Batch is a very prac­ti­cal and highly cus­tomiz­able ser­vice. It is one of Azure Com­pute ser­vices which are de­signed for per­form­ing com­pute-in­ten­sive or data-in­ten­sive tasks. Azure Batch com­bined with Azure Stor­age is a pair of draft horses which can han­dle un­usual work­loads. Setup is very easy and pro­gram in­ter­face is in­tu­i­tive and easy to code against. There is even an API to re­trieve files from a work­ing di­rec­tory of your ap­pli­ca­tion. Read more ›

Why is the Application Insights TrackMetric method missing?

Short an­swer is that method is miss­ing be­cause some­one in the de­vel­op­ment team for­got to use an Ob­so­lete at­tribute. This method in the Teleme­tryClient class in the Mi­crosoft.Ap­pli­ca­tion­In­sights NuGet pack­age is used very of­ten. Af­ter the lat­est up­date of the pack­age it just dis­ap­peared. Sur­pris­ingly, the method isn’t listed the In­tel­liSence but the older code where this method is used can be suc­cess­fully com­piled without any error or warn­ing. Read more ›

Microsoft announces its own Content Delivery Network

Mi­crosoft Azure pro­vided two Con­tent De­liv­ery Net­works (CDN) – Aka­mai and Ver­i­zon. To­day, cus­tomers can pick up one more provider – Mi­crosoft. The price is a half of con­cur­rent CDNs but the ser­vice is in pre­view. Mi­crosoft of­fers sim­i­lar fea­tures like others: HTTPS end­point, cus­tom do­main cer­tifi­cate, con­tent purge, com­pres­sion, geo-fil­ter­ing and core an­a­lyt­ics. Read more ›

Azure Portal: Hmmm... Looks like something went wrong

Azure Por­tal some­times fails to load. It hap­pened to me sev­eral times. It was al­ways caused by ex­ceed­ing the quota of HTML5 Lo­cal Stor­age. The so­lu­tion is as sim­ple as clear­ing the stor­age and nav­i­gate to por­tal again. Mi­crosoft Edge con­tains hid­den De­vel­oper Tools which helps with tasks like this. You can also delete en­tire brows­ing his­tory but it will af­fect all web­sites, not just Azure Por­tal. Read more ›

Memory leaks symptoms & causes in Service Fabric reliable services

Mem­ory leaks are hard to de­tect and can cause se­ri­ous prob­lems. While a sin­gle job task run­n­ing for few sec­onds doesn’t have to care about them, the ser­vice run­n­ing 24 hours a day must be care­fully tuned to suc­cess­fully ful­fill its job. More­over, mem­ory leaks don’t have to be de­tected straight away, they usu­ally ap­pear as an­other ex­cep­tion point­ing you to find­ing prob­lems in dif­fer­ent area. Let’s look at one ex­am­ple of a mem­ory leak and how it shown up. Read more ›

Keep your service running forever by designing an instant shutdown

Over a year of de­sign­ing and mov­ing sev­eral ser­vices from Azure Cloud Ser­vice to Ser­vice Fab­ric taught me few things which are im­por­tant to keep in mind dur­ing cre­at­ing or refac­tor­ing mi­croser­vices hosted in Ser­vice Fab­ric en­vi­ron­ment. Don’t for­get that Ser­vice Fab­ric pat­terns are tight to .NET, which has gone throw a mas­sive paradigm shift. You must be up-to-date at least with asyn­chronous pro­gram­ming to be able to code solid ser­vices. Read more ›

Health monitoring of the Service Fabric app upgrade

De­ploy­ing an up­date of any ap­pli­ca­tion can be risky, be­cause new code may con­tain new bugs. Unit test­ing is an ad­vis­able method of re­duc­ing the risk. How­ever, some mech­a­nisms de­pend on work­load. Some work­loads can be sim­u­lated eas­ier than others. Ser­vice Fab­ric pro­vides health mon­i­tor­ing af­ter the new ap­pli­ca­tion ver­sion is de­ployed to the clus­ter. If the new ver­sion is not healthy the old ver­sion is rolled back au­to­mat­i­cally. Set­t­ing up the pro­tec­tion against fail­ures caused by up­grades is rel­a­tively easy. Read more ›

How to secure Service Fabric cluster with an X.509 certificate

You prob­a­bly no­ticed that Ser­vice Fab­ric Ex­plorer is publicly ac­ces­si­ble and does not re­quire any user­name or pass­word. Ser­vice Fab­ric Ex­plorer al­lows mon­i­tor­ing and man­age­ment ac­tions like dis­abling nodes or ap­pli­ca­tion dele­tion. The clus­ter and its man­age­ment can be eas­ily se­cured with an X.509 self-signed cer­tifi­cate. Af­ter that the cer­tifi­cate is re­quired prior to ac­cess Ser­vice Fab­ric Ex­plorer or pub­lish­ing ap­pli­ca­tions to the clus­ter. Read more ›

Azure Service Fabric & Scheduled Tasks

Sched­uled tasks have many names. In Win­dows, it is tra­di­tion­ally called Task Sched­uler. In Unix-like en­vi­ron­ments job sched­uler is called Cron dae­mon. Mi­crosoft Azure con­tains Azure Sched­uler and Azure Web Apps have We­b­Jobs. Ser­vice Fab­ric has its own mech­a­nism called Ac­tor Remin­der. This ar­ti­cle ex­plains how to im­ple­ment them. Mul­ti­ple jobs could be encap­su­lated in a sin­gle as­sem­bly. Read more ›

Service Fabric cluster endpoints & Azure load balancer

Reach­ing ex­ter­nal re­sources from a Ser­vice Fab­ric clus­ter is triv­ial whereas reach­ing the clus­ter from the in­ter­net re­quires some con­fig­u­ra­tion. The vir­tual ma­chine scale set, ser­vice end­point and load bal­ancer comes into play. On the first sight, it could be seen as a com­pli­cated as do­ing a puz­zle, but un­der­s­tand­ing of mech­a­nisms un­der the hood helps to re­al­ize that whole pro­cesses is easy. Read more ›

Service Fabric Hello World

Start­ing with a con­sole app is sim­ple. Write a line of text to the con­sole is easy and the re­sult is vis­i­ble im­me­di­ately. Sim­i­lar si­t­u­a­tion is with Uni­ver­sal Win­dows app where is a Text­Block con­trol. Ser­vice Fab­ric is not harder. The most dif­fi­cult part is set­t­ing up your di­ag­nos­tics, be­cause cloud ser­vices does not have any user in­ter­face. Read more ›

How to set up a Service Fabric development environment

Set­t­ing up a de­vel­op­ment ma­chine for Azure Ser­vice Fab­ric ap­pli­ca­tions al­lows de­vel­op­ers to test and de­bug mi­croser­vices lo­cally. Lo­cal clus­ter use the same run­time that will run in Azure. Read more ›

Stateless, Stateful or Actor service?

Ser­vice Fab­ric is a dis­tributed sys­tem plat­form that makes it easy to pack­age, de­ploy and man­age scal­able and re­li­able mi­croser­vices. Ser­vice Fab­ric of­fers sev­eral types of nodes. How to choose one which is the best choice for a given prob­lem? Read more ›

Performance, limit and pricing comparison of various Azure storages

While tra­di­tional PC has a file sys­tem and ran­dom ac­cess mem­ory, Mi­crosoft Azure is a lit­tle more com­pli­cated. Stor­age is dra­mat­i­cally af­fect­ing ap­pli­ca­tion ar­chi­tec­ture and per­for­mance. Re­mind how out­dating HDDs in fa­vor of modern SSDs al­lowed par­al­lel read­ing on a sin­gle drive. There are nu­mer­ous fac­tors to take into con­sider­a­tion when think­ing which stor­age is the best for some kind of data. A loop it­er­a­tion counter has dif­fer­ent re­quire­ments than cus­tomers list. Read more ›

Zkušenosti s technickou podporou Windows Azure

Stroje chyby nedělají, zato pro­gramá­toři, kteří jim říkají, co mají dělat, ano. Proto když jsem v nes­názích, musím kon­tak­to­vat tech­nickou pod­poru. Živ­otní zkušenosti mě naučily pře­dem se smířit s tím, že je to až ta poslední možnost a ve většině pří­padů se prob­lém ste­jně nevyřeší. Proto mě mile přek­va­pila tech­nická pod­pora Win­dows Azure. Prob­lém se vyřešil do 10 minut a způ­sobem, který jsem vůbec nečekal. Celý článek ›