It's Monday, time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.
If you think you may have interesting content, share it!
Configure Azure Cosmos DB Continuous Backups (Rajendra Gupta) - Backup can be so powerful! You could return in time just before an error to understand what happens... Or so many other scenarios.
How To Run PowerShell Scripts (Brien Posey) - A script can be frightening at first, but this nice post will help you to understand them better. Perfect for less technical people.
Introducing Qodana for Azure Pipelines (Anastasia Khramushina) - Qodana is can analyze your code in CICD on many platforms, and now also in the Azure DevOps.
Microservices in Azure (Jon Hilton) - Excellent post to get started and do you first Hello word micro-services application.
Programming
.NET Rocks! vNext (dotnetrocks.com) - Another great show... And so happy about Glimpse.
Tips for Deploying your .Net project (Gregor Suttie) - Looking for some quick suggestion from some on with experience? Here is the perfect post for that.
Basic Tier Virtual Machines (Kenai Kwa) - It’s time to save money. We need to change the type of our VM to be basic for all Azure VMs that don’t need load balancer or scalability.
IIS Reset on Windows Azure Web Role (Value Maker) - Safe yourself sometimes and gray hair by reading this post before you got to do IISReset on an Azure VM…
One of the questions that clients often ask is: What tools could be used for Windows Azure development. Everyone knows that you need a web browser and a code editor (ex: Visual Studio), but what else? So, I decided to do a serie of posts to present them. This second post is about the Auto-scaling Application Block or WASABi for friends.
This serie is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all tools. Some other excellent tools are surely available. If you think I have forgotten one or want me to talk about one, let me know. I will be more than happy to adding it to the list.
To achieve elasticity until now, you needed to do it manually through the Azure management portal or writing your own code using the REST API. Using Wasabi, you just need to define some rules and the application will scale automatically: It can use a schedule or can be triggered by metrics, for example running fewer instances at night or adding extra instances if the CPUs are used at more than 80%.
The auto-scaling application block can be hosted either in a Windows Azure role or in an on-premises application. The auto-scaling application is typically hosted in a separate application from the target application that you want to scale.
Various scenarios are available to help you manage the auto-scaling by dynamically changing instance counts or performing application throttling of web/worker roles. The rules can auto scale based on timetables or metrics collected from the application and/or Windows Azure. You can even use notifications to preview any scaling operations before they take place and you can also use some PowerShell cmdlets to manage the autoscaler. You can constrain the auto scaling by:
Setting the instance counts upper and lower bounds
Preventing fast oscillations in the number of role instances with the stabilizer
For this demo we will use a simple Hello word application and scale it with a rule via a console application based on time.
Step 1: Put the app in Azure
To get started an Azure application is needed. Don’t forget to assign a certificate since the console application will need it.
You can then publish the application on the cloud.
Step 2: Adding the scaling application
Now create a console application and name it AutoScalingConsole. Add the WASABi package by executing: Install-Package EnterpriseLibrary.WindowsAzure.Autoscaling.
It should run without error and your Solution should look like this.
Step 3: Add and configure the rules
Add a new file call Rules.xml and set the property Copy to Output Directory: Copy always. Copy-paste this xml into the rules file.
It contains two rules: A default one that is always active, defining minimum and maximum instance counts of 1, and a second one used for scaling. The variable “Is rank” with a value of one means that it can be overridden by other constraint rules with a higher rank. . Naturally, if that rule is applied, there will be only a single instance of the role.
The second rule is named peaktime. This rule has the same target, a higher rank, a minimum value of two, a maximum value of four. Also a timetable makes the rule active for 20 minutes, starting at 10 minutes from the current time.
Step 4: Define the service model
You will now add a new xml file called services.xml and set the property Copy to Output Directory: Copy always. Copy-paste this xml into the services file.
Replace [yoursubscriptionname] with the name of your Windows Azure subscription and [yoursubscriptionid] with your Windows Azure subscription ID.
Replace [yourmanagementcertificatethumbprint] with your Windows Azure management certificate thumbprint.
Replace [yourhostedservicednsprefix] with the URL prefix of your Windows Azure hosted service.
Replace [yourstorageaccountname] with your Windows Azure storage account name and [yourstorageaccountkey] with your Windows Azure storage account primary access key.
Step 5: Configure the Auto-scaling Application Block
Right-click on the App.config file in Solution Explorer, add one if needed, then click Edit Configuration File. In the Blocks menu, click Add Autoscaling Settings. Now set the rules.xml and services.xml as sources for Rules Store and Service Information Store. Via the File menu, Save then Exit.
To by able to track evolution of the the testing let’s add some logging. In Visual Studio, double-click on the App.config file to open it in the editor. Then add this system.diagnostics at the end of the file:
You can now run the console application and observe how the auto-scaling rules work with the Azure application. Check the Output window in Visual Studio that logs which rules are being matched.
Conclusion
Using Wasabi makes your application elastic but doesn’t make your application scalable you must therefore design for scalability. If you have any comments, suggestions or experiences to share, feel free to let me know by adding a comment, by e-mail or by the contact page.
HTML5 + Cloud = Elasticity² (David Pallmann) - In this post David Pallman continue is explanation of relation between frontend and backend by explaining how both of them need scalability today.
New Features in the Entity Framework June CTP - New features: enum now supported, table-valued function(TVF) kind of store procedure usable with Linq, multiple result from a store procedure and by able to cache a compiled version of the Linq query. Even the geo localisation reach the EF.
Development Is Design- If you think that rounded window corners or cutesy animations are design... read this post. It's decoration. The development is design....
TFS Azure–Technical Access Preview Experience! (Tarun Arora) - Last week I read a post that was explaining how TFS socks. But today when I read and I see all the progress they did, I say that I would love to work with Azure TFS.
Sync Framework Toolkit now available for download - This toolkit allows other platforms to be used for offline clients such as Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, and Windows Mobile; in addition, non-Microsoft platforms such as iPhone, Android, and Blackberry can be utilized as well as HTML.
![clip_image001[4]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnKKEec7LqmkH4kMt2xBqOuNqPC5d2oh6QtfNdDcPTSZQLnUcLp2RQe6uvoLshV29kTH0-m-OYMd2f-TO_gStitQX9ljQssuzOnGCwPbH-1plXhgHhRL2WZW4moh5jxKAFe6_1SWeUVew/s1600-h/clip_image0014%25255B1%25255D.png "clip_image001[4]")
![clip_image002[4]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg75PohdT8gpLjHbL_ByIAnHXe9uPlKDaKz4Qyp2zJw0_eNqBsU3RYfqKS2HBk9vVTYSrKzF3yvMY_7nu_dwSQQB3R-Dw8X1sKJC-dL-kji_KSIjyjBLKDBxegGymxG8u2k4klsLRWqE6M/s1600-h/clip_image002%25255B4%25255D%25255B2%25255D.png "clip_image002[4]")
