a developer's notebook
In this post we are going to explore what we need in order to setup a local environment for our Azure Functions implementation, and how we can easily update our Azure Functions App through GitHub, using continuous integrations. Let’s start with some details about Azure Functions. What is Azure Functions? Azure Functions is a serverless event-driven experience that extends the existing Azure App Service platform; serverless…
In this post we are going to explore a feature provided by Azure App Service called “Testing in production” that allows you to direct a portion of live user traffic to one or more deployment slots of your web app before swapping this deployment slot to production. You can, thus, analyze your app, check for exceptions or errors, and make certain everything works properly, before your app…
In this post we are going to explore: how to simulate CPU-load hosted on an Azure web app; how you can set simple rules for automatic scaling; and how to setup alerts to get notified when your app is under pressure. Let’s start by creating a very simple ASP.NET core web api application. The default web api template in Visual Studio is more than OK….
A common practice to increase the performance and availability of a web application is to distribute it in multiple servers across the globe. Thus, customers will be served from the data-center that is closer to them, thus reducing response latency. In addition, when one server confronts downtime, other servers will handle the requests without the user noticing it. In this post we will explore how easy it is to setup…
In this post we are going to use Visual Studio Team Services to automate the build and deployment task of an ASP.NET Core Web application to Azure. What is Visual Studio Team Services? Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) provide a fast and easy way to plan, build and ship software across a variety of platforms. Whether you work in the cloud, on-premises,…
In this tutorial we are going to map a network drive on our computer to a file storage in the cloud using Azure File Storage. This can be very helpful if you want to share files among multiple computers and, bearing in mind that the storage is in the cloud, you can scale your drive as much as you need. First of all, let’s start with…
Sometimes you may want your Azure website to not be publicly available or to restrict the access to it quickly and easily, without having to perform any complex configuration or code changes. This actually can be achieved with a few clicks through Azure Websites Authentication/Authorization; a feature that allows users to quickly restrict access, using Azure Active Directory, with just a few clicks. In this post,…
In the new Microsoft Azure Portal, you might have noticed that, next to some of your resources, appears the text “(Classic)”, for example Storage Accounts and Storage Accounts (classic). This happens in order to separate resources that have been deployed with the Classic deployment model from the ones that have been deployed with the Azure Resource Manager. Some Background Azure originally provided only…
In Azure if you have two or more SQL Databases and you want to perform a query across them, you might come across the following error: Reference to database and/or server name in '[database table]' is not supported in this version of SQL Server. In order to perform cross database queries among SQL Azure databases you need to use the elastic database query feature. What is…
In our previous article we explored the option of creating, deploying and managing the Parse Server using a pre-configured VM image on Microsoft Azure. In this post we are going to describe an easy way for Parse developers to continue their work on Microsoft Azure by leveraging the following mobile services; Azure App Service and Notification Hubs. In Azure MarketPlace, when searching for Parse Server, you may come across…
