Azure makes it simple to spin up many different types of resources, and likewise it is fast and easy to remove resources. This is a great thing for proof-of-concepts, because it allows a really fast test cadence – it is one of the first selling points of the cloud. Instead of waiting for hardware to … [Read more…]
When I first set up my website, I found that the performance was really not what I was hoping for. It was really slow to load, it didn’t get faster with reloads, and it didn’t seem to matter how much horsepower I threw at the servers involved – it was just slow. I found Google … [Read more…]
When I initially set up my blog, I had very little idea what I was doing. I’d heard of WordPress and Project Nami, and decided that it would be cool to run a fully PaaS website in Azure. I knew I wanted a performant website – if it’s slow, there’s penalization in SEO. Plus, everyone reads … [Read more…]
Recently, I spotted this question on Reddit: This is a good question – it indicates that the poster is realizing that the public cloud is a different place than on premises! There’s three things to address: What does the Pets vs Cattle mean? Does the pets vs cattle concept mean you need to change how … [Read more…]
Way back in May, the Azure team published a bunch of new images based on a 30GB boot disk, instead of the standard 127 GB disk. Why? To save YOU money. In many cases, it’s optimal to run applications from a second disk – SQL data, according to best practice, should run across three (system, … [Read more…]
tl;dr – don’t bring your own image unless you really have a good use-case and you’ve already modernized configuration management processes. Re-evaluate what is baked into the standard deployment and carefully plan automation. Test thoroughly. When first investigating running applications in Azure, customers often ask me “How do I upload my base image to Azure?” … [Read more…]
As the title says – this is my shortlist of the important stuff discussed and announced at Ignite. I hope to follow up on some of these subjects with a deep dive. Unfortunately, this year I wasn’t able to attend Ignite in person, so I didn’t have the opportunity to talk with the Microsoft representatives … [Read more…]
Ahead of all the big announcements at Ignite, Microsoft has dropped a major announcement: Azure will support Availability Zones. This brings a whole new set of architectural possibilities into play when thinking about cloud migration. First – let’s address what an Availability Zone means. Azure Datacenters are regional – they exist in one (or more) … [Read more…]
I’m late to the game on this, but I think it’s worth writing a bit about the new Managed Disks service in Azure. For years, Amazon has had elastic Block Store (EBS)[footnote]I should point out that I know virtually nothing about AWS – I could be way off-base[/footnote]. EBS is a storage system dedicated to … [Read more…]
Most organizations have secrets, such as private keys and passwords that need to be protected. Many organizations (rightly) are very sensitive to where the secrets are stored, and how they are used. On premises, it’s possible to simply store the keys on a USB drive in a safe, for example, but for larger organizations this … [Read more…]