Good Monday, time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that caught my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.
You think you may have interesting content, share it!
Azure Virtual Machines vs App Services (Michael Shpilt) - The pros and cons of both are listed in this post with some advice. Everything you need to help you to make your choice.
I don't know for you, but I don't like losing time. This is why a few years ago I started using scripts to install all the software I need on my computer. Got a new laptop? N You just need to execute this script, go grab a coffee and when I'm back all my favorite (and required) softwares are all installed. On Linux, you could use apt-get, and on Windows, my current favorite is Chocolatey. Recently I needed to use more virtual machine (VM) in the cloud and I deceided that I should try using a Chocolatey script during the deployment. This way once the VM is created the softwares, I need is already installed! This post is all about my journey to get there, all scripts, issues and workarounds will be explained.
The Goal
Creating a new VM on premises applying the OS update and installing all the tools you need (like Visual Stutio IDE) will takes hours... This solution should be done under 10 minutes (~7min in my case).
Once the VM is available, it should have Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise, VSCode, Git and Node.Js installed. In fact, I would like to use the same Chocolatey script I use regularly.
In this post I will use Azure CLI, because it will works on any environment. However, PowerShell can also be use only a few command will be different. The VM will be deploy with an Azure resource Manager (ARM) template. To create and edit the ARM template I like to use VSCode, you don't need it but it's so much easier with it! I use two extension.
The first one Azure Resource Manager Snippets will help by generating the schema for our needs. In a JSON file you just need to type arm en voila! You ahave a long list of ARM template!
The second is Azure Resource Manager Tools. This extension provides language support for ARM and some validate. Very useful...
Creating the ARM Template
To Get started create a new JSon file. Then type arm and select the first option; to get an empty skeleton. Then add an extra line in resources and type again arm. This time scroll until you see arm-vm-windows.
A multi-cursor will allow you to edit the name of your VM everywhere in the file in one shot. Hit Tab to navigate automatically to the userName, and Tab again to go to the password.
Now we have a functional ARM template that we could deploy. However, let's add a few things first.
Searching the Image SKUs by Code
One of my favorite VM images for a DevBox is the one that includes Visual Studio pre-installed. One thing to know is those images are only deployable in an MSDN subscription. To specify wich image you want to use you need to pass a publisher, offer, and sku.
Here how to do it with Azure CLI commands
# List all the Publishers that contain VisualStudio (It's case sensitive)
az vm image list-publishers --location eastus --output table --query "[?contains(name,'VisualStudio')]"
# List all offers for the Publisher MicrosoftVisualStudio
az vm image list-offers --location eastus --publisher MicrosoftVisualStudio --output table
# List all availables SKUs for the Publisher MicrosoftVisualStudio with the Offer VisualStudio
az vm image list-skus --location eastus --publisher MicrosoftVisualStudio --offer VisualStudio --output table
Now that all the information is found, search in the ARM template and replace the current values by the one found. In my case, here are the new values.
Great now we have a VM with Visual Studio but our applications are still not installed. That will be done by adding the Custom Script Extension for Windows to our template. documentation page, a sample schema is there ready to be use.
The last node of your template is currently another extension. For the purpose of this blog post let's remove it. You should have something like this.
We will copy/ paste the snippet from the documentation page a change a few little things. Change the type (thank to our VSCode Extension for that catch). Update the dependencies to reflet our demo.
To use the extension your script needs to be available online. It could be in a blob storage (with some security) or just publicly available. In this case, the script is publicly available from my gist.github page. I created a variable in the variables section that contains the RAW URL of my script, and a reference to that varaibale is used in the fileUris.
The extension will download the script and then execute a function locally. Change the commandToExecute to call our script with unrestricted execution policy.
You have a timed window of ~30 minutes to execute your script. If it takes longer then that, your deployment will fail.
# First, we need a Resource Group
az group create --name frankDemo --location eastus
# ALWAYS, always validate first... you will save a lot of time
az group deployment validate --resource-group frankDemo --template-file /home/frank/Dev/DevBox/FrankDevBox.json
#Finally deploy. This script should take between 5 to 10 minutes
az group deployment create --name FrankDevBoxDemo --resource-group frankDemo --template-file /home/frank/Dev/DevBox/FrankDevBox.json --verbose
What's Next?!
We created one template; you could make it better.
Deploy from anywhere
By moving the computerName, adminUsername, adminPassword, and the script url in the parameters section, you could then put the template in a public place like GitHub. Then with use the one click deploy!
Directly from the Github page or from anywhere you just need to build a URL from those two parts: https://portal.azure.com/#create/Microsoft.Template/uri/ and the HTML Encoded URL to your template.
If my template is available at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FBoucher/SimpleDevBox/master/azure-deploy.json then the full url become:
It's very easy to forget to turn off those VM. And whatever you are paying for them or your using the limited MSDN credit it's a really good practice to turn them down. Why not do that automatically!
That can be very simply done by adding a new resource in the template.
Virtual machines (VM) are used in most solutions nowadays as a [ProcessName] server, temporary machine to run tests or make demos, and sometimes even as a development machine. One of the great benefits of the cloud is that you only pay for what you use. So unlike the old server, that you keep paying for, you won pay virtual machine's CPU for when you turned off! In this post, I explain how to do it with your existing machines and also what to do with all the future one that you will be creating.
From the Azure portal (portal.azure.com), select the Virtual Machine (VM) that you which to edit. Then look at the option panel, on the left, for Auto-Shutdown in the Operations section. You should have something that looks like this:
At any time you can enable and disable that functionality, it won’t affect the running VM.
Now, to activate it click on the Enabled. Then Select the time you would like to see the VM shutdown. Be sure to select the good time zone, by default it’s UTC. You can adjust the at for UTC of change the time zone, both options are valid.
Now you could decide to enable the notification. That could be useful if you may want to postpone the shutdown for one or two hours, or integrate the shutdown to another process like backup, cleaning…
To activate the notification option just click on the enabled, and enter the email address. If you want to attach the shutdown to a Logic App or an Azure Functions use the webhook. Here an example of notification email, see the Postpone options link.
What if you have many VMs running
Let's say you have already twenty (or more) VMs running, you could have executed a PowerShell script like:
Update - 2018-03-14 Well, today this is only possible for VM part of a DevTest Labs. Not for "regular" VM. However, I'm sure that day will come pretty quick.Does that mean that you need to go in all your VMs and set it manually? No. You can use an Azure Automation that will stop a list of VM on a regular schedule. A big advantage of this solution is that you can be more creative since it offers a lot more flexibility. You could identify the VM to shutdown base on some TAGS, you could have a different schedule base on the week vs weekend. You could even have a task to start VMs in the morning... More to come on that topic in a future post... If you want to read about how to get started to Azure Automation click here.
Multiple VMs that already exist, no problem
Obviously, if you have multiple virtual machines that already exist it is not very efficient to change their configuration one by one via the portal. Here is a small script to change the configuration of a large amount of VM in one shot.
The variable $selectedVMs contains all the VMS that we wish to edit. In this sample, I only get VMs contained in the RessourceGroup cloud5mins, but there are no limits to what you can do. You could select all VMs with a specific OS, tags, location, name, etc.
The variable $ScheduledShutdownResourceId will be the identity for the configuration for the auto-shutdown we wish to inject. Note that the provider is microsoft.devtestlab.
Next, we create a collection of properties in $Properties. status the one that active or deactivate the auto-shutdonw. targetResourceId is the resourceID of the VM we target.
The only things left is to specify the time and timezone.
If you prefer, I also have a video version that explains all the steps.
How to shutdown automatically all your existing VMs
End Update
Let's create a VM with the auto-shutdown pre-configured with ARM
Of course, a much more efficient way to set the auto-shutdown is at the creation time by adding a new resource of type Microsoft.DevTestLab/schedules to your template. This option was previously only accessible for DevTestLab, but recently was made available to any VMs.
Here an example of the variables that could be added to your template.
And here an example of Microsoft.DevTestLab/schedules resource. One of these should be added for every VM you wish to auto-shutdown. Because your script is for one server, however, only one instance is required.
Take a Break with Azure Functions (Justin Clareburt (MSFT)) (Justin Clareburt) - I know the Holidays are passed, but it's always time to learn Azure Function. Do yourself a favor the next rainy or super cold weekend... Follow this "program".
What part of your job can you automate? (Kevin Bah) - With time, all developers accumulate "tools" and these days with all those scripts and API capabilities... It's not a question of how can we do something, but more: where to do it...
How to handle BLANK in DAX measures (Marco Russo) - This great post will helps us to think about if blanks could by part of our data and how to manage them.
Is jQuery still relevant? (Remy Sharp) - I've really appreciated this post that brings numbers to sustain his answer.
Designing a Conversation (Alexandre Brisebois) - Interesting post that digs into the paradox where "us", humans have been communicated since our beginnings but still have trouble doing it, now we want to plan ahead and architect communication with machines.
Azure Logic App Updates January 2017 (Chris Pietschmann) - You through the number of new features would be less because of holidays Guess again, once again this team delivers tons of new stuff.
Introducing Docker 1.13 (Docker Core Engineering) - This post summarizes all the great features added in the new release and shows again why Docker is such a fantastic tool in the containers' world.
IaaS isn’t your only path to outsized gains (James Staten) - Excellent post full of true and interesting facts that, at a very high level, explains the real power of the cloud.
Source Control Integration in Azure Automation (Beth Cooper) - Fantastic news. This post shares with us how to take advantage of this useful new feature and configure our source control.
VSCode Documentation moves to GitHub (Chris Dias) - I really think the documentation is a major piece of VSCode. Having it " to the is a fantastic thing.
How to write better and faster using templates - Interesting post that shares with us a way to speed-up our writing. Personally, found very productive the time to structure the post since use it to organize my thoughts. Like in "old time" when we were passing through the code to adjust the indentation.
I was really happy to ear about Microsoft Azure Data Center that will be built in Canada. And it was definitely not only good thing that was published this week...
Import Sample Data to Azure DocumentDB (Stephen Baron) - Document playground is not the only tools available to get started. This post introduces the Data Migration tool.
Spotlight Resources - This post lists some of the useful tools that can help you when working with Azure.
Mostly Cloudy – Sept 5th, 2014 - Really interesting post that resumes the last release of Azure. It also gives a reference for every feature to get more detail.
Writing a Site Extension for Azure Websites (Elliott Hamai) - Great tutorial that explains how to build and test our Site Extention. It also explains how to publish it privately or publicly.
Azure DocumentDB: first use cases (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Interesting post that places the new DocumentDb compares to the other solution in Azure.
A chatroom for all! Part 1 - Introduction to Node.js - This post is the first tutorial of a series about developing a real application in Node.js and putting it to Azure. In this one, learns how to setup your Windows environment.
VM Image (Christine Avanessians) - Wonderful, so many new functionalities! I'm really looking forward to know more and try it.
VM Agent and Extensions – Part 1 (Kundana Palagiri) - This post introduced the currently available extensions with a quick example. VMExtension looks a very promising feature with a lot of potential.
Cloud Architecture Patterns (Bill Wilder) - Very instructive books that explains many different patterns with clear and practical examples. All the patterns presented are also implemented in an application Page of Photos (or PoP for short). A great book that I strongly recommend.
jQuery UI Demystified: Part 1 - Since jquery and jqueryUI are so often used use these days, avoid just doing copy-paste. Take few minutes and read this nice tutorials that explains how to use the jqueryUI widget.
Writing About Code: Structure - Second part of a very interesting article about how to write. This
one is all about get our writing in a good shape. Because well structured our post will be easier to read, understand and share.
(This post was originaly published on Matricis Blog)
Usually my posts are a lot more technical, but this time I decided to share an experience with Windows Azure that saved me a lot of headaches while saving my boss a bunch of money ;)
The Context
Here at Matricis, we often set up our development environments on virtual machines (VMs) witch we host on our internal infrastructure. We have several different development VM configurations, based on the technologies and versions needed. A big advantage to doing so is that if the required environment changes, we simply choose the corresponding VM template. For the project I'm about to talk about, we needed quite a powerful development system, especially since every developer required Visual Studio 2012, SharePoint Foundation 2013, SQL Server, ADFS, and a handful of other tools (fiddler, notepad++, different browsers, etc.)
The Problem
To be able to develop with SharePoint, it is strongly recommended to have at least 8 gigabytes of RAM (I first tried with just 6 gigs, but it was still a nightmare). My laptop only has 8 gigs of memory, so I couldn't run the VM locally. I asked our IT guys if it was possible to host the VM on a local on-premise server. They answered that they didn't have enough space for the environment. They were very sorry, but I was actually quite happy about it; I now had a perfect use-case to work in Windows Azure!
The Solution
I went to see my boss and explained the situation: instead of buying a brand new server for development and test environment purposes, we should simply use Windows Azure’s IaaS! We could start setting up the VM in less than 10 minutes. In an hour we would be ready to code! The development VM would only be up while it was in use, meaning that it wouldn’t cost a cent while nobody was working on it. On project completion… we would delete all the VMs we were using, and no more fees! My boss loved the idea!
The core team for this project involved four full-time developers, and here is a high level look at our development environment: The Active Directory is shared but every developer has their own SharePoint, Sql Server, and ADFS making them autonomous.
As you can see, it's a hybrid environment since the Team Foundation Server (TFS) is on one our local servers. In the morning, I start my VM and within a few minutes, I'm connected remotely and I’m ready to work on a great machine. With a little PowerShell script that I wrote, I don't even need to log in to the Azure Portal to start and stop my VM. Another great joy to this scenario is that I can now work from anywhere and on any kind of machine: from home on the family computer without VPN or from a Hotel on my laptop or my Surface Pro! Happiness often comes from simple things.
In general, I would say that the experience was very positive, but on the road we did encounter some issues that we had to resolve. Since all IPs on Azure are dynamic, we discovered that the domain controller that is hosted in Azure, must be started before the other VMs. This way its IP will always be the first one, therefore the other VMs will find it without any issues. Furthermore, in our architecture, the source-control (TFS) is on-premise. When you check-out or check-in your code, you are passing through the firewall. However, since these actions are intensive, the firewall may interpret the activity as attacks.
Because the job of a firewall is to protect your network, you can imagine what happened... the connection was lost. Once we identified this and created Firewall exceptions for the Azure VMs, everything was good.
In Conclution
I hope this post will encourage you to try Windows Azure as a development and test environment, because it's a really effective and cost-beneficial way to execute on different projects. For more information about the Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service go to the Windows Azure Web Site.
10 Tips for Learning a New Technology) - Nice post that gives simple suggestion to have a better kick start when learning new stuff. It gives a lot of online training website references.
How Do You Choose Your Cloud Provider?(Toddy Mladenov) - This post doesn't give an easy answer, because it's impossible. However, it explains how to find your answer.
Moving all a website's images and assets to the Azure CDN - This one was on me stack since few days now, but I shouldn't have waited; really nice. I liked the live thing also, it gives a real idea of the effort. Time, and difficulty of the project. Note:Watch until the end.
Git Explained: For Beginners - If you don't know about Git, or you still not familiar with it? This is definitely the post for you. From vocabulary to code sample, this tutorial explains all you need to know.
Sublime Text (2) (Drew Barontini) - I discover Sublime Text 2 few months ago, and since then I'm installing it everywhere. Here is a nice post that presents important features and customizations.(To install using Chocolatey just type cinst sublimetext ).
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