The world's greatest Azure demo

I've been talking to a lot of people about Windows Azure Oh lately and building quite a bit of stuff in Windows Azure too and one of the things that struck me is it's actually hard to find one good resource that takes you through the value proposition that is both cloud and Microsoft's implementation of it in Azure so I thought maybe the best thing to do is use about an hour and see how much stuff I can jam into it and aim for the world's greatest is your demo I'm hi I'll see how close I get but this is going to be a heap of stuff that helps you understand what jury is and hopefully makes a little bit more sense of this whole cloud thing so let's just jump into it and where we're going to start is in the is your management portal and I'm currently logged into my portal and this is all of the assets that I currently have in Azure let's start making stuff and to make stuff everything is very user driven on demand you just basically drop into this little new item here and choose what you want and what I thought we might start with is a virtual machine and what I want to show you first is that when we look at the gallery for virtual machines we've got a heap of stuff in here so lots and lots of different Microsoft products everything from clearly Windows Server editions through to things like SharePoint but then all the way through the things like sequel server so an actual platform a product on top of a Windows Server and then lots of open source and light XE stuff and other things that a lot of people probably didn't expect to actually get in a Microsoft product but it's in there and we can just go next next next all the defaults and stuff happens but let's do this let's just grab a Windows server we're just going to take the latest and greatest we can Windows Server 2012 r2 datacenter that is just fine I'm going to give it a virtual machine name and I'm just going to call it greatest VM we can choose a scale I'm just going to go with the default at the moment single core 1 and 3/4 gig of ram will come back to sky a little bit later on I'm going to make a username in order for me to log into it and I'm going to make a password and we will just confirm that guy and then we're just going to jump into the next step I'm going to leave most of this just exactly where it is the only thing I'll point out for the moment is that we can choose where we want to put this we can put it in various locations around the world and there are more coming online later on like Australia hurry up with that one please guys that would be great everything else defaults to false defaults let's go through we can see that it's going to open up a couple of endpoints that we'll talk about in the moment we can remote desktop and we can PowerShell but that's about it let's just say ok to that now what we'll see here is first of all a little message from when I was cleaning up before it deleted some stuff we'll get rid of that everything else we see here is a very sort of asynchronous single page web app sort of environment where lots of stuff goes away and occurs whilst I'm sitting here talking what I'm going to do though because virtual machines do take a little while to create I mean this is relative terms five minutes maybe 10 minutes I'm going to leave that guy creating and I'm going to go off and do something else and what I want to do next is go and take a look at websites so let's go and check that out so let's jump over and have a look at what I've got at present I've got two websites here one's called hack yourself first and one is called have I been pwned now what I could do is jump in and create a new website I can go and choose something say from the gallery and if I jump into the gallery I'll find a bunch of stuff that's actually pretty familiar to me so things like let's have a look Acquia Drupal if I really want to Acquia Drupal I could get that from here something a bit more familiar to the Microsoft space the DNN platform so there's a heap of stuff straight out of the box here and it just means that I can start a website with all of this already configured I want to do this a little bit differently though I'm going to get rid of this wizard and I'm actually going to go and drag from one of my other screens my visual studio open and I've already got a web application here and we're going to take a look at what that looks like in just a moment but what I want to do is use the cervix pleura to drill into my Windows Azure account and there's those two websites I have already and I'm going to create a new website directly from here and let's call this guy greatest web site now I'm going to put this in the same region as the VM in this demo I'm not actually going to do anything with the two of them but you want to be really cautious that when you create interdependent resources like websites and databases they're in the same location things don't behave real well if you don't do that so one of the reasons I'm doing this in Visual Studio is I want to show you how there are different ways of coming at a juror but they ultimately create the same underlying resources what that means is if I minimize this here we go in my portal I can now see that I have a website called greatest website now this is pretty cool because I have actually just created a live website facing the world it's there it works it's being given this temporary URL and if I click on that guy we'll see what this website looks like and you can see the URL just takes the name of the website and puts it on Dada's your website's net and here it is so basic demo website with as your template the other thing about this is that there is a wildcard certificate which means that I can access HTTP as well so if I want to test my website over HTTPS this works just great now of course this is not really the website I want to stand up it's just a demo so let's jump back over to visual studio and let's publish my website that's what I want to look at next now there's a really easy way to publish websites into Azure and all I'm going to do is just jump over to my solution Explorer right click on the website grab publish I've got another demo that I was doing in there before I'm going to ignore that what I'm going to do is just click on import import from Windows as your show me the websites I've got here's a website it's called greatest website ok - that is going to download the publish profile from Azur so that gives me things like the server name that it needs to publish to and I'm just going to get published and what that's going to do is going to compile the website locally and it's going to publish it all up over HTTP we can see the path here it's going to publish - and magic will happen and everything will be live now while that happens I just want to jump back over to the website for a second and jump back into the management portal and show you what we've actually got here we can see here under the mode column it's a free website my other ones are standard web sites now let me just be a little bit clear about costs here now the cost of a free website and I think you can probably see Ron going here I'm just going to drag these your pricing calculator over here cost of a free website is wouldn't you know it free now of course there are limitations on a free website so for example I can't bind a domain and we're going to have a look at how to change that later on the next tier up is I can go to a shared website now when I go shared I'm in a multi-tenant 'add environment the same piece of logical infrastructure is used by multiple tenants so in other words other people's websites the cost as when I go to one $9 77 a month now one thing to note with the calculator make sure you scroll down and check what currency you work in I'm working in Aussie dollars not dissimilar to US Dollars it'll be a little bit less in US dollars regardless under ten bucks a month for a website and then you can do things like use custom domains so tell you what let's go back into Visual Studio and we'll just check that that website is now live and it should be just about there we can see that it is publishing each one of the assets one thing you'll notice about this process is it's a little bit slow now again this is a relative term I've just gotten a website up and running and live in the space of a few minutes but I'm going to show you how to make it a lot faster by deploying from source control in a minute as well main thing is for now this guy says hey publish one succeeded let's jump back into the browser back to our website we'll give this guy a reload and what we should see is the live running website now unfortunately this isn't quite what we see I'm not quite sure why it does this but sometimes it seems that when I publish a brand new site it goes a little bit nuts but at least it shows you this is not a contrived demo not everything always goes to plan but what I did want to do is I wanted to take that up to a standard website anyway because they're going to want to whack a domain on it later so let's go into my greatest web site and oddly enough I find that when I scale this the website actually starts working or it might have failed before and within my management portal I'm just going to go hey give me shared save that guy and now it's saying hey are you really sure you want to do this because it might affect your bill well it will affect my bill because it's going to go from zero to nine dollars something a month so I'll say yes to that and while that's saving one other little thing successfully created virtual machine so that virtual machine we set up in the first step is now created and we'll come back to that and have a look in a moment now for all of the assets energy us are things like virtual machines and websites the bullying is per minute so fragments sake if I run this demo for an hour and then I delete these resources I'm only going to pay for 60 minutes worth of runtime now put that in perspective back to the pricing calculator this is how much you're paying for that website that is one point four cents per hour now for your entertainment and for everybody's education I'm happy to pay one point four cents for this website and it's funny how you actually have to wrap your head around how different the prices are in this model let's go back to a broken website and give it a reload now that I've scaled it back up I now have the world's greatest is your demo running as a standard website which is good news so that's great but this probably isn't the domain I want to run it on so let's move on to the next thing in this demo and that's binding a domain name okay so let's move on to that domain bit because free websites are great and temporary URLs and things get you working very quickly but really we're not going to stand up anything useful without a domain so let's jump back over into our management portal we're now running on shared and because we're running on shared it means that when we're going to configure more stuff works now some stuff still doesn't work so for example you can only specify a 64-bit system in standard mode not in shared now we'll come back and make this standard later on so we can do some other stuff main thing is that as we go down and we get to manage domains we can now go through and drop in a domain name now I have set one up specifically for this demo and that particular domain is world's greatest as your demo com now before I can actually add a domain to an insurer website I need to add a cname entry and in fact I need to add a cname entry for the alias aw verify and I need to point it here so I'm going to copy that so don't get any of this wrong I'm going to bring over my DNS management environment and in this case it is go Daddy and yes I am conscious that many people don't like GoDaddy but it is also extremely common and is the most relevant example I can give you so we will add aw verify and I'll paste in the address that I copied just before which is this guy just here aw verified greatest website that is your website's net and let us now save that zone file you're about to save it okay I am sure now of course the thing about DNS is it can take usually one hour up to 48 hours I do find however that with GoDaddy and as Europe it seems to kick in pretty quickly and we'll see if it works this time or not but what I should be able to do is grab that URL copy that onto the clipboard back to Azure paste in the domain name things think magic hopefully happens and there we go green tick so that means that a juror has been able to identify that change last thing I need to do the IP address to use when you configure a records is this guy just here so I'm going to copy that back to GoDaddy into my a record which is just here paste in that IP address save the zone file I'll get the same sort of warning about having to wait for magic to happen okay okay okay back to your websites say okay to that and if everything is actually worked it should now be good we can see here that it's updating all updated let's see if I can grab that address and go to world's greatest is your demo com and of course it will think and think and think and here we go it now works we have now got a domain bound it also means I can kill off the other one on the temporary URL so we don't need to use that as your website's address anymore get rid of that guy we're now doing everything by a nice friendly URL so that is awesome we've created a free website we've deployed to it from Visual Studio we've scaled it up to a shared web site we've bound a domain and if my masters right we should be somewhere within about a quarter of an hour into this demo including all the explanations so that is good let's turn it up a notch and start deploying from source control okay so let's have a look at the situation with source control to date all I've done is just publish out of Visual Studio and that's fine that's marvelous it works very quickly but really you don't want to be deploying production websites from your IDE it's too error-prone is sending too much content over the web what you really want to do is make sure you're pulling everything from source control so let's do that back over to the management portal I'm going to go to the dashboard and I'm going to scroll down on the right-hand side and I'm going to set up deployment from source control now when I do this I get a few different ways that I can deploy Visual Studio online local git repository Dropbox you can actually set up a Dewar so that you can drop files in your local Dropbox folder let Dropbox magic happen so things sink and then azure will automatically pull that and then push it to your repository kind of cool but today we're going to go down the github path so what's happening is I have previously authenticated to github and linked things into Azure and all it's doing now is just going back to github and looking at the repositories that I have available I've got a whole heap of them in github and we're only really going to be using the one and it's not evil shoplifting site but is another demo it is going to be another one from this list and apologies but I'll have to obfuscate a few things towards the bottom of the list clearly world's greatest Azure demo is the one we want and I put this in github before this demo when I select it it's going to want to deploy from master and what it means is that every time I push something into the master branch in github azure is automatically going to pull it out and deploy it other people like to use publish branches or deployed branches or things like that and there are good use cases for that but today we are going with the defaults so okay to that now we can see little status here it was linking it is now linked we can dismiss all that we can now see that there is more magic happening you'll get our repository is linked we can now see deploying so what's actually happening here is Moe's your website is going off to github pulling it on how it's already happened before I can explain it but basically it went off it pulled everything and it has now deployed it now when I was preparing for this demo one of the things actually did is I put the greatest word on that website in emphasis so that is what is in my github repository what it means is is that this word when i refresh now should appear in italics which of course was what we get from an e/m emphasis tag ok so it is now gone italics now that's fine here's what I want to do though I'm going to flick back to this tab I'm going to drag visual studio over again and in fact if we scroll down we should see that there is no emphasis on greatest so this is actually not what is in source control I removed those a.m. tags after I last committed it so let me now go and grab github for Windows and I'll drag it over here we have an uncommitted change which is removing those a.m. tags I am going to say whoops removed a.m. tag like so let's commit let's sync and because we can still see the browser window behind this what we should see is that immediately after this hits github azure should go off grab that change pull it build it because what you've got to remember here is that azure is actually building the solution it's not just picking up files and moving it it's looking for that dot SLN file and it's compiling it and it's publishing the web app so here we go deploying deploying deploying and it is done so removed eeehm tag is now our live version so let's see if we have indeed had an e/m tag removed back over to here let's see if we still have each alex after we reload and we don't magic has happened greatest is no longer in italics so that is a really good example of faster is to deploy by github and part of the reason it's so fast is because of all the version control Beauty insofar as just the changes have been pulled down to Azure I just change one file that's a pretty small change to pull down into Azure and because as you're already has a local copy of the repository it only needed that one file now here's the other thing that happens when we look at my two deployments just here both of these deployments still exist in Azure it saves I think it's about the last five deployment they get saved in Azure if I drop this little arrow down will actually see a little bit more info about the deployment so we'll see things like for example deployment scripts and the output of deployment commands now this was the first one so this was where the greatest word was in the e/m tag now here's some of the magic let's go and click on redeploy and we can say are you really really sure that you want to do this yes it will then push out that previous deployment so because as your keeps these previous deployments just sitting there ready to go bang we're done no editing land that's real-time we can go back to our website reload and we should get a telex again there we go now that is really cool because that means that if you screw something up and believe me I've screwed some of these up before you can then be out wandering around with your smartphone open up the browser and go give me that last version and it just deploys out so that is a really super super easy way of managing your websites all right so all that is pretty cool all about is websites and that you know the thing about websites is that it is a platform as a service offering it is a bundled up service that is much more than just hosting it's all the stuff that goes with it such as the on-demand scaling and the ability to simply hook into source control and other things that we'll look at a little bit later on but you can always just drop back to the metal back to the raw infrastructure as a service and set this stuff up manually now I generally don't think that's a good idea unless there are things that you absolutely positively have to do manually but of course there are those times and that brings us back to the virtual machine we created earlier which is now ready to use so let's move on to the next section and we'll remote into that machine and start managing it so let's find that Machinery created earlier and it should be down here in VMs and here it is greatest VM it is running in East us that's where we put it now all I have to do to remote into this guy is click the connect button and what it's going to do is download a dot RDP file here it is I'm going to click into that guy and it is going to put something on a different monitor over the other side because it just seems don't like to do that and we're just going to connect in to that guy and because it also likes to mess with me it will put the prompt all the way back over on the other screen again and I'll drag it back over and I'm going to use another account to connect and this is just the one we created just before and I'm going to hopefully remember my password if we want magic to happen the way it should ok but then it goes back to the very first monitor again and we drag it back again and then it goes all the way back to the very first monitor again and I'll drag they go back into focus again and hopefully this will be the last time we do this one thing to note as well is that if you're doing this within a corporate environment you may find the default ports for RDP are blocked so before you beat your head against the wall in the office trying to connect to your shiny new sequel VM maybe just test it from a connection that doesn't have the sort of firewall restrictions that many environments do now this is going to take a few minutes to fire up because it's the first load of a new machine so I'm going to show you something I'm going to minimize this guy and back on the portal here ok let's drill into this VM and one of the things you'll find here first of all notice how there's a lot less options than what you have for websites because it's not sort of a managed platform as-a-service where you've got all of these different options around a very specific offering it's a lot more high-level a lot more generic fewer things we can configure but we can configure a couple of things and one of them is endpoints now when I set this machine up right in the start of the demo I said look here's a powershell endpoint and a remote desktop endpoint and really all these endpoints are doing is allowing connections into the environment now what I want to do here just as a demo is let's imagine we did want to put IAS on this environment we would want to allow port 80 probably put 443 for SSL as well let's just do 80 for the moment so we're going to add a port we'll just use the default here we'll jump in here and we'll call it what do we want HTTP HTTP port 80 all the other defaults are okay go for it this is now going to allow HTTP connections now depending on the port in the protocol you may still need to configure the Windows Firewall in the machine but this gives us the ability to make the connection now we can see here the whole thing is actually still configuring adding adding adding what we can do and we can do it for things like remote desktop that are already there is we can go down and say let's manage Ackles so let's whitelist the IP addresses that are allowed to connect to this and in this case it's just asking for a remote subnet now the good thing about this is that if you're always managing your environment from a single IP address or a single gateway or a couple of very known limited sets you can go through and whitelist this here now it's not a VPN don't confuse it with that you're not going to get any encryption on the connection if it's not implicitly supported by the protocol but you are going to stop other people from being able to remote into your environment if the IP address isn't whitelisted now note you can also do that with HTTP so you could actually stand up a website where you say I'm only going to allow people from a set of whitelisted IP addresses to connect into it and that is kind of cool you also can't do that with the website service we just looked at before so let's close this guy and I'm going to jump back over into my remote desktop and with any luck here we go we now have a remote desktop we are remoted into the server this is just the first run and again it's a Windows Server 2012 r2 I'm seeing the local time over on the east coast of the US because that is indeed where the machine is running and basically we have an environment now I know how I did this right at the start of the demo and then came back to it but again you're normally looking at some are in the order of five or ten minutes to get a brand new machine set up no paperwork no approvals no but well none of the usual rigmarole that you often go through that has good and bad sides the main thing is is that the facilities are there to do this almost on-demand and whatever governance you decide to put on top of that is another issue but at least it's not the technology holding you back so let's look at something else that the promise of cloud is this sort of dynamic scale where you can say hey look this size was good for me yesterday but it's not good for me today I just want to change things quickly let's have a look at what we've got inside this VM and I want to just be really really clear about capacity here and in this case let's take a look at say RAM okay so we've got one and three-quarter gig of ram in here this is what we've got in the processor stakes that's great that might be a good starting point but is it really enough well maybe it's not enough so let's do this let us jump back into the portal and what I'm going to do is just resize that portal we'll just give them a little bit more room here because I want to see what happens that are they piece session in the background as we start mucking around with this I'm going to go into configure and I'm going to decide that you know that's not really enough I want hey let's get eight cores in 56 gigabytes of RAM now I'm going to save this and if I save this and I scale it it is going to restart okay that's fine I'm about to fundamentally change the configuration of it now while that's happening let's check the pricing calculator so what would we actually pay if we scale it from that little sort of small instance up to that big a7 instance well here we go Windows virtual machines so we were at for one instance we were at about 67 bucks a month and again that's Aussie dollars a little bit less in u.s. I want to take it up to this guy over 12 and a bucks a month now that sounds nuts I'm not going to spend 1,200 bucks just to give you guys a demo but again look at this a dollar sixty one and a half an hour so that's nothing I don't care about a dollar sixty one and a half over an hour and I particularly don't care about one small fraction of that because I'm only billed by the minute as soon as I finish this demo I'm going to either turn this server off and I'm no longer going to be paying for this compute power or just delete it altogether and I'll still no longer be paying for it of course if I just turn it off I can always start it up again and indeed if you have a look at my virtual machines and we go back to the list here I've got this guy it's stopped its de-allocated I'm not actually using it at the moment because I don't need it I use this for my have I been poned project in order to import large data breaches but I only need it maybe once a week or once every other week so I just start it when I need it I go and get a coffee while it's booting up it'll take a few minutes I come back I use it and I shut it down you can see down here I can just start it as soon as I want it to fire up again getting back to our current demo here's our greatest VM it says it's starting if I go back to my RDP session we will probably find that it is well it's kind of not working it's dead the whole thing is actually restarting so I'm going to flick back again and actually there we go we can see that we have actually disconnected on our RDP session so I'm just going to cut the video here for a couple of minutes I'm going to let it reconnect and then we're going to see what we have back inside our environment okay looks like everything is just woken back up again which means that I can now jump back over to here and login again if I can remember the correct password okay so it's just logging back in again and you know again what we got to remember here is that this is just a normal machine well it's kind of a normal machine it is an infrastructure-as-a-service machine so it's a virtual machine that I've been able to just provision on demand it's sitting on top of shared infrastructure it does have its own allocated resources which is why we saw things like 1 and 3/4 gig before but for all intents and purposes it's its own logical machine now I'm not quite sure why in a server it wants to connect to printers and TVs so we'll say no let's not do that but let's go and have a look at the scale now so we'll go back into local server and what will we see here in our RAM 56 gigabytes nice and of course we now have a different processor as well and inevitably if we jump in and say run task manager we should see a whole bunch of processes sitting in there which would be very very nice over to performance and of course when we jump down and have a look towards the bottom right we will see that we have eight virtual processes running on two sockets that is a rather tasty looking little machine so very happy with that we have just scaled up on demand to a totally awesome configuration now of course I can go in and manage this just like any other server I can go in and add and remove components including say is and build this up as a dedicated web server I can go into Windows Firewall I can basically manage any of the normal things that you would on a Windows server so that is great what I want to do now though is start to have a look at some of the monitoring that we can get from outside of that virtual machine environment so let's go back and have a look at the portal okay so back on the portal let's have a look at monitoring and we'll start by having a look at the Machine which is created so let's jump into this greatest VM and we'll hit the monitor tab and what we'll see here in this very ajaxy sort of interface is a whole bunch of metrics for the machine now I've only just recently created this machine so we don't have a lot of stats and we're only seeing stats for the last hour but what you'll see down here is metrics like say CPU percentage so how much of my CPU is being used now this is really handy if we're seeing that we're consistently using say seven point seven percent of the CPU do we really need those eight cores do we perhaps need four cores could we scale this down and keeping in mind it's got a reboot but do we perhaps on a Sunday night scale this down to four cause everything's still identical in the machine in terms of the files and the configurations it's just the virtualized infrastructure that's changing if we knock this guy down to four cores and let's do a demo well let's try take a scenario if we went from eight cores 56 Giga RAM 1,200 bucks a month and we took it down to say an a5 and now we're looking at only two cores fourteen Giga RAM we have just taken out about three-quarters of the cost being able to say I'm going to save 900 bucks by scaling this down and I know I can probably scale it down because my CPU is only sitting there at under 10% that is a really nice option to have now maybe the right answer is somewhere in between and you just incrementally scale it down but when you have the choice to choose your scale and apply it with such low friction it gives you a whole bunch of different options you didn't have before and that's where this monitoring is really good because it can tell you this information so I'm monitoring again a couple of things here because we're going to have a look at the website monitoring in a moment CPU disk i/o network i/o duration one hour we can make it 24 we can make it a week an increment here the increment we're seeing is five minute increments 255 3 305 now let's go and have a look at websites so back up to here here's the website where creditors before greatest website let's drill into him let's look at our monitoring and we're going to see a couple of different things now one of them is different metrics now is saying things like HTTP servers HTTP server errors are very specific to IAS they don't necessarily make sense for a Windows Server virtual machine you may not run any HTTP services on it we're also seeing things like requests these are HTTP requests to the underlying web server the other difference is we're looking at one hour here and again we can do 24 hours 7 days but we're seeing increments here of one minute so on a website you're monitoring is broken down into 60 second intervals what this means is that you can change a website deploy it out and immediately see the impact on the environment by virtue of the monitoring you write a dodgy piece of code and your CPU is probably going to get seriously hit you inadvertently load up too many other assets on the webpage and your requests are going to go right up assuming the traffic itself is static of course but you know while we're looking at requests there's another thing we can do here and this is setting up alerts so one of the things that I want to know about is when certain events happen to my monitoring so for example I genuinely want to know for my websites when the requests start going through the roof because it's probably gotten a bit of press somewhere or there's been some other event that I probably want to get on top of so let's do this let's add a rule and I'm going to make this rule website busy and we'll say something like requests exceeding 100 per minute of course busy is a pretty relative term so pick whatever you need to them will go on request is already selected you can't change that because we created the rule whilst the request metric was selected and we're going to say if the threshold is greater than 500 and it's going to be count can't change that either over the last pick a period so maybe five minutes is too small you want to know hey what if it's really busy over an hour or something we'll take five minutes send an email to the service administrator and co administrators enable the rule make it go and here we go creating the rule this will be done if this website now suddenly starts getting lots of activity I'm going to get an email now this is neat and it's just one of the other things you get by virtue of having a website service let's move on and I want to talk about availability and particularly about SaaS let me show you an email that I got just recently from Azure it's this guy just here and effectively what this says is dear customer we are going to have to do some maintenance on your virtual machine and of course this is fine machines do have to have service packs and patches and security fixes and all the rest of it applied to them and it is very nice of Microsoft to do this for me in my virtual machine now what this is saying though is it talks a lot about availability sets and in fact this one says these maintenance operations impact single instance deployments of virtual machines that are not using availability sets and what it's really saying is that if you only have one server and we've got to take it offline because we've applied some sort of a patch you subtract one server from one server you've got zero servers if you have an availability set and you have multiple servers and we take one off you will still have more than one server running now this all comes back to SaaS most of the services in Azure have a 99.95% SLA in other words your service may be offline for up to 0.05% of a month before you get some form of financial compensation now 0.05 percent of a month is about 45 minutes so you must expect that your service could be offline for three-quarters of an hour it may not all be together either and here's the other thing if you have multiple services and they all have that same SLA they may not all be offline at the same time your website could be down for 45 minutes and immediately after your sequel database could be offline for 45 and immediately after that your table storage could be offline for 45 you could have two and a quarter hours of outage which is actually 99.8% availability and still be within the SLA a little bit off topic I've got a blog post on that if you want to go and look at as your SLA s the point here is that if we can use an availability set Microsoft will give you a 99.9 and nine SLA now what that means is that conversely rather than up to 45 minutes offline per month it's only 1/5 of that so think more around nine minutes that's a big difference and it's all to do with the veil ability sets so let's go and take a look at what an availability set means we're going to go back to a VM we'll drill into our greatest VM we'll drill into configure and we will look in availability sets and we will see there is nothing there we can create an availability set and we will obviously call it greatest something greatest availability which it doesn't like so we go backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards until it does like it and we say save now this is going to create an availability set once I hit the button correctly yes we want to do that and it's going to think and it's going to give us a warning in just a moment which says hey you have an availability set so that's fantastic that's really good but you only have one machine in there now what is your wants you to do is to have multiple machines two three four keep going when you have multiple machines in the same availability set what happens is that as your makes sure that when maintenance is performed you don't have them all offline at once here's that message so Microsoft have actually got a good little diagram which sort of shows how look you might have one server in an availability set in one rack on one side of the data center and then there's another one somewhere else so that really if you sort of go through logically you're not taking them all offline at once when you get emails like the one I just showed you before now when you go and add more machines and you put them in the same availability set that's when warnings like this go away it is still up to you to manage how traffic is routed to those machines when they may go offline and this is why we have things like traffic manager in Azure as well which I'm not going to talk about in this demo but be conscious that it's there so that's availability sets and now you're aware of what the SLA is mean and how they relate to actually having machines online in giving yourself a bit of redundancy against simple outages I want to have a look at one more thing in virtual machines before we go and take a look at some other things so here's what I want to look at next I want to look at disks and I want to look at disks just because it's a good example of something that in the offline world in the traditional world has often been a little bit tricky a little bit tricky insofar as the process of requesting storage and the Associated cost let's have a look at what it means in Azure let's imagine we want more storage we've got the VM selected we say attached I'd like to attach an empty disk and I'm simply going to say ok now while that is attaching what does a disk cost pricing calculator I often find it's easy just to go full calculator and search for storage and we will find it down here now couple of things here first of all we are talking about locally redundant storage and what this means is that all of your data has three separate copies it's all in the one data center it's all one seamless instance to you but Microsoft are making sure there are three redundant copies so that if any one gets taken out you've got another two if to get taken out you've got another one if three get taken out we're going to talk about geo redundant storage in just a moment let's have a look at how much storage costs now here's the problem I have with the calculator it's very very hard to select small numbers about as low as I can get this let's try and get around a terabyte that's probably about as close as we can get it so just under terabyte 67 ozzie bucks a month so let me say that again to make it really clear because some people seem to think storage is a lot more expensive than what it needs to be sixty seven dollars per month per nine hundred and fifty gigabytes of locally redundant triple replicated storage that is a rather good deal now here's the other thing geo redundant storage let's see if we can get about the same selection here somewhere up a little bit there we go 950 gig that is almost half as much again now why is this here's the thing with locally redundant storage you do not have a Godzilla immunity with your locally redundant storage any monstrous forces of nature which take out the data center are going to take out all three of your replicated locally redundant instances if you're happy to pay that premium Gaea redundant will also replicate your data to another data center in the same region Godzilla comes along smashes up data center a data center B has still got a copy of it we're getting a little bit off-track though the whole idea here was to add a disk and in fact if we now look at the disks tab we should see that we've got a new disk this is the one we just created which is in addition to the existing disk now here's what I want to do let's jump back into a virtual machine and let's now jump into disk management create and format hard disk partitions that is the right guy and again none of this is specific to Azure this is just your classic disk management in Windows Server discs - let's just go ok - all of that I am by no means a server administrator and I'm sure there are people who understand this significantly better than me but even I know how to go through and just simply add a new disk into a Windows Server and most of it is by going Next Next yes thank you very much please perform quick format finish and in a couple of minutes we will have just a fraction under one terabyte worth of extra disk and it will be in here do I want to format drive e yes please it is formatting in a few minutes we will have another brand-new disk here we go not even a few minutes Volume II healthy petition primary petition open up Windows Explorer again and here we have it it's just about all free it is a fraction under one terabyte new drive e dead dead dead simple so that's how easy it is just to add additional this capacity and of course we can add many more disks we might not be able to make them a terabyte or greater but we can add a heap of them what I'd like to do now is jump back into websites and what I want to show you is scale Auto scale and this is profoundly cool so I am going to jump back over to my site greatest website and if you recall our scale is shared so it's actually using resources on the same machine as other websites that may not be your own now here's the trick if I go to standard and I put just this website greater says your website on standard you can see what I now have down here is I have an instant size if I go back to share that's gone back to standard instance size these instant sizes are consistent with the instance size as we saw before for VMs some of them anyway small medium large now what this actually means is that when we go standard with the website we're actually getting a dedicated virtual machine we can't RDP into it we can't open up ports we can't install arbitrary software and frankly I couldn't be happier I have a blog post around with great as your VM comes great responsibility where I outline what I mean by that but in short having a virtual machine gives you a lot of responsibility and it removes a lot of features that you get around websites such as the one I'm about to show you now there's one other thing I want to show you here small VM I'm going to get back to the pricing calculator I am going to go back to websites and if I grab a standard website I want you to read this load-balanced up to 500 websites per region dedicated to your apps up to 500 websites how much is that seventy-five bucks this is one of the points Scott Hanselman makes a lot for that 75 dollars you are getting one machine that will give you 500 sites you still pay for storage on top of that and we saw that cost before it was 60 something dollars for about a terabyte you still pay for bandwidth and bandwidth two things with bandwidth first of all first five gig of outbound data is free so you get five gig out without paying second of all you don't pay for ingress you send out it to your site you don't pay for it thirdly here's what data costs let's make it a nice round number around 100 gig mope around 100 gig mark 11 dollars something for a hundred gigabytes of egress data get smart and use things like CD ends bundle and minify your assets on the website like CSS and JavaScript and be efficient with your assets and 100 gigabytes goes a very long way trust me I've tried so go back to websites now here's what we're getting once we go to a standard website I can put another 499 on here and not pay a cent more other than for Dever storage or egress data they use or other services that cost money like adding ssl but i can get 500 websites and 500 domains or more actually because you can have multiple domains beside for that seventy-five odd bucks a month so that's great but here's the other thing we get and this is what I really wanted to show you here what we can do now is we can start playing with capacity and scale now before with the VM we added scale and what we did is we went from one processor and one-and-three-quarter gear am up to eight processes and 54 Giga RAM we scaled up still one instance everything more chunky this is going to allow us to scale out let me show you what I mean first thing we can do is set up a schedule for when we want to scale there's no schedule at the moment but we could go through and say I want to scale differently at night and differently at weekends and this on that time and all of this fancy stuff about when you do or do not want to scale I'm not going to change any of this because if my website needs to scale and we're going to have a look at what I mean by needs in just a moment I wanted to scale now here's what I'm going to do I'm going to scale by CPU and this gives us these options down here I am going to scale from a minimum of one instance up to a maximum of three instances I'm capping my potential cost what this means is depending on the traffic I could end up with three separate small VMs running my websites and then everything would get load balanced now the way it's going to scale is there as a target CPU range between 60 and 80% all of this is configurable okay I can find the sweet spot for me so assuming I live it at the defaults and we go from 60 to 80 what it means is is that if the CPU of the machine and we know how to look at that now because we saw the monitor tab before if it goes above 80 I'm going to get another instance now when I have two instances my average is going to come down beneath 80 if that average then goes up above 80 again I'm going to get a third instance and I can take this up as high as I can financially tolerate if I think my site's going to do fantastic things and there's a monetary value to that I probably want to set this pretty high if I'm worried about just getting DDOS'd I'm probably going to scale this down and incidentally as you--as does have a number of DDoS defenses but I'm getting off-topic now when it goes the other way so when the CPU gets down under 60% put that back at 60 it's going to take an instance away that might bring it down to two so now I've only got two machines serving the load so the average CPU goes back up the load backs off again it drops down beneath 60 and another instance gets taken away what I love about this is that it incentivizes you to use a small instance size but to have lots of range in terms of the number of instances you have because when you do that you are only going to be provisioned and then charged for resources that you need I hate the idea of this classic model where someone says three years from now your website is going to grow big enough that you will need a gazillion gigabytes and 20 million CPUs and therefore you're going to have that now you don't need it and you will pay for it but we speculate that sometime in the future you may or conversely someone underestimates you get six months twelve months down the line and you've got a serious scale problem so you've saved yourself money early that's good but now you've got a technical debt by virtue of under estimating this model gives you what you need when you need it both more or less and you only pay for it then that is freaking awesome now as awesome as that is I want to move on and show you something else and what I want to show you this time is something around Auto provisioning so remember earlier on right back at the start I created a VM in the management portal here and then I showed you how we could create a website in the management portal and then I said but I'm going to go into visual studio and I'm going to provision it out of Visual Studio instead and that's what I did and the point I was making is that you can provision resources through multiple different interfaces indeed there are api's to be able to do that restful api is because they're all the rage but there is also a set of ease your management libraries brady gesture on the windows azure team talks a lot about these and you have some great material that i've used to create a little demo now here's what I want to show you in my demo I'm going to go and list all my resources and actually while I do that you can see this message here says hey I haven't saved my changes which is kind of handy because it's easy to lose track of what you're doing when you can configure so much online so let's just actually cancel that save these changes because I do kind of like the idea of what I scaling and yes I know that there's a financial impact but I'm only going to pay for it if I need to show me all my resources now what I'm going to do is over in another window here I have my visual studio running that's got about a hundred lines of code mostly plagiarized from Brady that is going to automatically provision some resources I'm going to run this project and I'm going to drag over the little console window and I want to explain what's happening on here so the first thing it's doing is it's going out and it's looking for an instance of a virtual machine that is called sequel server 2012 sp1 standard on Windows Server 2012 you can provision a pre-built sequel server instance on Windows Azure in fact if we have a look at the pricing calculator and we have a look at our virtual machines what you'll see here is that there is a prebuilt sequel one and that pre-built sequel one just down here if we take say a small one and we take say one instance we're going to play a hundred one bucks a month that actually sounds a little bit more than what we're paying for a standard VM before the windows vm if that was small with one was only 67 the difference is not only do you have sequel server installed on this instance it's licensed you don't have to go out and pay large amounts of money for the license either for standard or for enterprise upfront you can lease the entire environment little turnkey solution if you like but don't let me lose track of this little console here okay so what my little console here is doing is it's gone away and it's found that sequel server image and it's found the ID for it so we actually need to get back an internal name for it it's then gone away and created a cloud service which is like the umbrella under which a VM sits it's created a storage account called the greatest Azure storage and inside that storage account it's going to put the VHD the disk and we're going to go and take a look about in just a moment - so it's created that storage account and now what it's doing is it's creating the VM and that VM is going to be greatest as your VM and okay so we've actually seen the whole thing just finish so it's taken 121 seconds but what we've actually got now if we go back into a portal is we're going to have VM called greatest auto VM let's go and see if he's there let's go into virtual machines and sometimes I finally got to give it a reload after Auto provisioning stuff it's almost like the portal keeps track of things that you're creating and Auto refreshes those but if you do something in the background sometimes it tends to get a little bit lost the main thing is that they all end up in the same place under the same subscription this just gives us a way of orchestrating the process and I really like the idea of orchestrating say non production environments so what happens if I just want to build a test environment from scratch I could just put it in a console app fire it up magic would happen and it would all be there so now we can see here is our greatest Azure VM and you can see it starting up it's all being provisioned but now it's actually powering it on and it's running for the first time I won't bother remoting into that because you've seen what that looks like now the main thing is is that we've seen that we've been able to actually automatically provision the resource now before I move on I mentioned VHD and the disk a couple of times if you've created virtual machines before even just on your desktop you've probably seen Verdi's and what I want to show you is that if we jump on over to the storage account and we can actually go into our greatest as your storage which is just here we can go into a container and this will be the container that I've just automatically created in a container is simply going to hold our VHD so see we've got on here called Verdi's I can go in and this will show me that virtual disk that was just automatically created 127 gigabytes so that's the size that's been automatically provisioned I can now just download that guy now if I try to download 127 gigabytes over my connection it's not exactly going to be fast and you can see that we are unfortunately looking at some number of days here internet connections in Australia not the fastest of things certainly not for 127 gig so clearly I am NOT going to be doing that the point I wanted to make is that you can pull down a VHD you can also upload a VHD from your on-premise environment and mount it into a virtual machine so there's some nice interoperability there another point I'll make now with regards to storage and I probably should have made this before when we created a terabyte worth of extra disk this says 127 gig but that is the maximum size the disk you only pay for the amount of that that you're using when I created a terabyte before I wasn't paying for terabyte I was paying for 0 now that's a really interesting analogy when you think of the classic on-premise management of infrastructure if you go to your IT group and you asked for a terabyte a disk chances are you're going to pay for terabyte a disk if you go to Azure and you are screwed terabyte a disk you're going to pay for the slice of that terabyte that you're using and it's probably not going to be one terabyte from day one it may not ever be one terabyte you will only pay for what you use as you go along and that is a very good example of a commoditized pricing model so back over to my virtual machines this is still firing up but I think I can now stick a fork in this section and call it done because that is the automatic provisioning of the machine now just think for a moment what it means when you have a set of management libraries that can automatically create scale shut down and destroy resources for example my queue automatically scheduled resources to be shut down on the weekend if you can shut them down on the weekend and for most of the night you could cut your infrastructure bill in half now that won't work for a lot of resources like for publicly facing websites but that may work very well for corporate resources used by office bound colleagues it at least allows you to have a discussion that you couldn't have before so that discussion is hey guys what's it worth to run this on Saturdays and Sundays and overnight is it worth another 20 grand a year or why don't you meet them halfway hey guys what's it worth to have this running just as fast on Saturdays and Sundays as it does throughout the rest of the week if we could scale this guy down to a fraction of the weekday scale over Saturdays and Sundays and just wear that sort of five minutes of outage on say a Friday night and then on a Sunday night we could save you $5,000 a year now we as the computer guys don't have to make that decision but it allows us to have a very very interesting discussion with our customers that they've probably never had before that is very cool so let's look at one more thing that I think is very cool and that is sequel Azura now we've looked at two primary types of resource in this demo we've looked at infrastructure as a service so that's what we're looking at now VMs and we've looked at platform as a service so that was the website and it was the website insofar as we got a little slice of IES and we either got a free slice of ice or we got a shared slice that had other customers on it as well or we got a slice of our own dedicated VM when we had a standard website but the other thing that we can get here in Windows Azure is we can get sequel as a service now I'm a developer and I've used sequel day in and day out for a very long time but he'll be honest it scares me sequel server is a big thing and whilst like many other people of being the accidental DBA before I really don't like the responsibility so let me show you what it means to get sequel as a platform service in Windows Azure now there's a couple of ways we can do that I can either go down into the old new item in here data services sequel database and I can go and create things using the wizard or I can be a bit more contextual about it let me show you what I mean if I go into websites and I go into my greatest website one of the things I can do in here is jump over to my dashboard and I can scroll down a little bit and a little bit further and I can manage linked resources now by linking resources we're going to get some nice features by virtue of an explicit association between them let's link a resource create a new one we'll make it sequel it's actually defaulting the name to greatest website underscore DB and it's probably a reasonable expectation that if I'm creating a linked sequel database to this website that it's going to be a part of this website and hence it's giving it the name I can choose an existing sequel server that I've created now here's what i mentioned earlier on don't use Eastasia if your website is an east US that's a long way between those two places and likewise I'd only want to use West us that's a long way to East us not when you really want to get latency measured in a fraction of a second let's create a new database server I'll give it a logon and we'll just call it Troye hunt just for simplicity I'm going to keep using the same password over and over again and friends do not use the same password over and over again not for the same service and definitely not for different services auto-generate it put it in a password manager now clearly the obvious sensible thing to do here is to make sure I am using East us it's defaulted to east us to save me from myself tick to that now it is creating the linked resource so we are going to get sequel server as a source or rather we getting a sequel server database as a service and we can see down here that the guy is still creating we can see the details of the guy who is still creating and whilst I have heard some criticism of this interface so for example it would actually be kind of nice to be able to scroll through these a little bit easier but regardless I actually think it is a very good interface so now here's what we've got we're in our greatest website but here is our linked resource our greatest website database now we've drilled down into database so here's what I want to show you now I would like to connect to this database using sequel server management studio that is the address of this database let's try this let's bring over sequel server management studio now let's make a new connection and I'm just going to type the name of that the authentication is going to be sequel authentication the login it's going to be Troye hunt the password is going to be the same stupid password I am using everywhere for the purposes of this demo and it is not going to work which I will tell you in just a moment now the question is why is it not going to work and here is a message tells you I will obfuscate my IP address but you should be able to see enough from this message to tell that my IP is not allowed to access it now there's a couple of interesting things about this first of all my IP can't access it that's obvious I need to what this my IP but second of all sequel server management studio 2012 is aware that my IP address can't access the server and that there is such a thing as going into the Windows Azure management portal and getting access to it so SSMS is becoming more aware of the paradigms within Windows Azure or in this case within sequel sure and by the way you probably keep hearing me call it sequel as you're not sequel server and indeed Microsoft do call it different things and in fact I think the sequel is your name has changed a couple of times as well but there are some idiosyncrasies between sequel server proper and sequel sure and we'll touch on those a little bit later regardless I need to set up Windows as your firewall rules for this IP because until I do this I'm not going to get in the current IP address ba-ba-ba-ba-ba is not included in the existing firewall rules do you want to allow it yes please let me in okay that would be fantastic it's just going to save that now can go back to SSMS and now I should be able to connect successfully so this is good and what you've got to remember is that if you go between different locations or if you have a dynamic IP address which would make life a little bit miserable actually you may need to add multiple IP addresses into the firewall rules that's important if you forget that stuff will fail and you'll wonder why it has failed now what you don't have to do is whitelist the IP address of the website if it is running in Azure and we'll take a look at that in a bit more detail in just a moment so here's an interesting thing as well in SSMS you're seeing a little blue database down here so SSMS again is aware of what this beast called sequel is your is and it's actually identifying attributes of it that are different to sequel server proper my PC has sequel server proper honor yellow database a little bit different okay so we've actually connected successfully and what we'll see when we have a look in databases as soon as it allows me to and thank you Australian latency all the way to the east coast of the US for making this a little bit slow but what we'll see is that I have a master database so very similar deal to what you'd get in sequel server proper and you will see that I have a new custom database so we will just open that gap and we have a look at our system databases we will have a master indeed we can see master is the context of the current database now I want to show you one little thing to demonstrate the differences between sequel server proper and sequel Azure does this look like a reasonable statement well of course it does let's run it okay so use statement is not supported to switch between databases this is a very minor difference but it's a good example of just one of the little idiosyncrasies that occurs between sequel server proper and sequel Azure other idiosyncrasies that have got more significance at things like primary key structure some of these will bring you undone if you're not aware of them but at least in my experience about 90% of what we would normally know a sequel server functions identically in sequel sure so let's just look at one more thing that we get from making this a linked resource and here's what it is we fire back to the website and I go into a greatest website demo and I go into configure and then I scroll down a little bit once this guy loads we're going to see a bunch of configuration settings now these configuration settings include connection strings here we go our connection string has automatically been populated with greatest website DB the connection string is hidden for security purposes but we can show it and we can see our server name here and ultimately we can see the credentials of the back end of it and there is my fantastically secure password now why is this a good thing well it's a good thing because it means that when we publish the website if I have a connection string called greatest website under school DB and indeed I can either change this value or it can change the value of my app this connection string will be automatically applied so I don't need to store these credentials in source control don't put your connection strings in source control of people many people have come undone as a result of doing that I can also do that with app settings I can have a key in my app setting just like so and I can set the value in here and it will overwrite the value of the one on the website it's almost like a config transform for the release configuration and this will overwrite any config transforms you have in your relays configuration as well because this happens downstream of that so that's pretty neat now there's one more thing I want to show you in this world's greatest is your demo and that is I want to talk about data backups earlier on I talked about locally redundant storage three copies and G redundant storage and about how your data can be replicated into multiple instances so that if there's failure you can recover it now here's the problem you are protected from failure but you are not protected from yourself if you delete data out of those tables and if you haven't done this in your career if you haven't been doing it long enough or you will do it because I have certainly destroyed data before and the problem is is that when you destroy data and you have locally or G redundant storage you're going to destroy every copy now this is where we talk about backups and it's not backups to protect you from the infrastructure foul and you get that implicit you get protection from the local failures you get protection from the Godzilla scenario you don't get protection from yourself so backups are meant to take snapshots of your data over time so that when you screw it up when you screw it up you can roll back let's go to our database we'll say okay we'll just lose those changes on that website or don't mind that at all this time and here's what I'm going to do I'm going to go into configure on my database and I'm going to set up an export status let's make it automatic now what I'm going to do is I'm going to export to a storage account now I actually have a storage account that I created when I automatically created the virtual machine from my consulate before and what I'm going to do is every single day I'm going to back it up now we get a pink exclamation mark I'm not quite sure why it's pink but clearly it is important frequent exports can increase your database cost by up to 100 percent now why is this well the reason is this Microsoft have configured sequel Azure so that when a backup is taken it actually creates an exact copy of the database and then it backs up the copy now again I'm not a DBA but I would fairly assume that that is so that there is no unjú overhead on the live database that bit I'm fine with the problem and the 100% bit comes from the fact that when that process runs even though the backup may run extremely quickly you are charged for one full day of the replicated database now that's a bit unfortunate because that does double your cost if you're backing up every night but of course you may not need to backup every night and this is going to depend on the profile of the app for example if you have an app that's not actively accruing data on a daily basis so perhaps it's a fairly static site you might say we'll look let's backup once a week maybe every three days I don't know find a sweet spot that could be different too if you are actively collecting customer records hour by hour minute by minute you want to have a little bit more redundancy than perhaps losing a week's worth of data but again at the end of the day this is cheap until you get to large volumes of data the cost is literally measured in the singles of dollars per month it's not very much so let's leave it there every one day let's use the defaults here let's start it at midnight and let's retain the data for 30 days so what that means is I'm going to have a rolling 30 days with the files and because we're doing it every one day it's going to be 30 files that I can restore to I'm going to log in as my account and my password is this and we all know now that's great as demo 2014 it's going to think about that for a moment and make sure it's right we get green ticks when things work which is good and save so now what's going to happen is that every single night it's going to automatically back up that data and it's going to appear in my storage account now I'm not going to have a backup until this first runs but let me go and show you one I prepared earlier I want to show you my have i been poned website because i have got that set up to automatically backup every night now when I go into my containers I've got one called automatic sequel export as your Kratz is for you automatically and when we look at this you can see that I have decided to keep a rolling 14 days with the data here's the oldest one and it gets newer and newer and newer as we go down and indeed the data gets larger I've got people subscribing I've got various things that are logged here's what happens with my data I can grab any one of these and I can download a backpack file a dot B AC P AC file just like that I can then pull this into sequel management studio and restore it locally and it works just beautifully in my local instance a sequel server likewise I can tell sequel server management studio 2012 to connect directly to this storage account and pull one of these backpacks directly into my local sequel server instance so there are lots of ways of us actually working with this data and indeed I could use the process I just explained to restore it back into Azure if I do screw up and delete things now this is really really important don't forget when you're standing up any website that accumulates data to have versioned copies of that data and in fact one feature that dropped just the week before writing this is the ability to do that with a website as well so we're here backups so if your website is accumulating data you can actually back it up just the same way that you would with your sequel database and in fact you can see it looks pretty familiar the other thing you can do in here then I'm yet to use this is you can actually orchestrate the database backup to very neat stuff so that's where I'd like to leave this demo and right now it's actually ended up at a little bit more than an hour but I thought it was really worthwhile showing you the bits that I think of the most fundamentally important now this is far from exhaustive and what you got to do is look down the side of this portal here to see how much other stuff there is in the portal that I've never even touched on but in terms of helping people quickly understand the value proposition of concepts that they're probably pretty familiar with already but just haven't seen them in a true cloud context the one where stuff happens on demand where you're paying by the minute where terabytes of data cost amounts of money represented in tens of dollars a month that's the stuff I really wanted to get through and more than anything to show you that once you understand how to tie the pieces together in Azure you can do amazing things the biggest thing for me has been learning about how all of these pieces work together and how to use this environment efficiently and I must admit it's been an absolutely fantastic experience so for those of you that are looking at getting into Azure just get in there and give it a go spend a few dollars literally just a few dollars to see how the thing works and experience it firsthand because I'll tell you one thing those who don't understand these cloud paradigms and insist on doing things the way we've done them for the decades before now are going to get left behind this is how we're going to manage our technology solutions not only in the future but right now

Channel: Troy Hunt

Views: 395,817

Keywords: Windows Azure, Cloud Computing (Industry), Demo, Microsoft Windows (Operating System)

Id: 7V8HikBP1vQ

Length: 82min 30sec (4950 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 13 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Catsler]

Troy is awesome.

[u/chizdfw]

I'm currently brushing up on my .NET technologies and I found this very helpful.

[u/cushyl]

This is the first time I've really looked into Azure or platforms as a service, and it seems incredible! How does this compare to AWS?

[u/[deleted]]

Great link, thanks!

[u/dfrear]

Really enjoyed this, can't believe I didn't notice the option to allow continuous integration!