Tag: Azure

Load Balanced IIS Machines

I noticed a contest this week while working on the Database Weekly newsletter. It’s the Cloud Hero contest, with the chance to win a Surface Pro 3. I could always use another device, or at least a device I could give away, so I decided to enter.

There are a few things you can do, all of which are interesting to me in terms of a direction that I, and Red Gate, want to move. I don’t know if Azure works everywhere, but we are considering moving SQLServerCentral, or perhaps parts of it, to Azure, so this was a good chance for me to try out some new Azure stuff.

I’ve messed with a few things in Azure, but mostly on the PaaS side. That interests me more, and I’ve done little with IaaS. I certainly haven’t really worked with IIS much in Azure. I decided to go through the VM setup, to create two IIS machines, load balanced on the same URL. I used this blog post with a cartoon and demo to run through the process.

It was a bit more than 10 minutes, mostly because some of the allocation stuff in Azure took time, and the responsiveness from the VM in Azure was slow. From the time I connected to the time Server Manager popped up was over two minutes for each machine. Since I was going through some of the steps sequentially, that meant it was slow to get going.

The video and the portal bring to light some of the issues of Azure. It’s a great tutorial and I was able to get the two machines load balancing IIS in 20 minutes (or less). It was surprised how quickly it went, but I also had to stop and think. The load balancing and cloud services are different now than they were when the post was written.

I’m sure that’s the case with lots of Azure content. In some sense, this means that we will have lots of issues with people trying to learn how to use Azure as they’ll find content and information that is woefully out of date, sometimes quickly. I wonder if we need to think about having some code on blogs for Azure that marks the content as potentially out of date after it’s been out for 6 months.

It’s a challenge to keep the content up to date, and luckily the changes weren’t too different in the portal.

I am glad that I was able to get to IIS machines up and load balanced, delete them, and bring them back. That makes me think I may find some use for this Azure stuff, yet. I have a few projects in mind, including rebooting my personal site. Perhaps Azure will be the place I give it a go.

December 16, 2014
The Subtle Push to the Cloud

With SQL Server 2014 released, there’s the temptation to upgrade for many DBAs. However the licensing costs and debatable improvements in the product will temper the DBA’s enthusiasm with the reality of the ROI seen by management. While reading about the licensing changes, I also saw this note from Tom LaRock, where he wrote about the features most of us aren’t using. It made me think about upgrades, and perhaps the strategy Microsoft is employing.

As Tom mentioned, the features not being used are Enterprise Edition features. This prevents many of us from upgrading to use them because Enterprise Edition is so expensive. Actually, even Standard Edition is expansive these days, given the per-core licensing, and I suspect lots of companies with SQL Server 2008, 2005, even 2000 are debating whether or not the upgrade is really worth the cost.

The piece also mentions that Azure is much less expensive in the short term, and you should consider it. Of course at some point the money you pay will be more than buying a license and a server, but that assumes you run them for the same length of time. You’ll likely upgrade at some point, and if you upgrade both hardware and software, the cloud starts to look more attractive.

It’s not simple to move into the cloud, nor is it appropriate for some applications, but it does seem that Microsoft would prefer to have most companies running in Azure, on a single platform they run, they patch, and they support. Many companies might prefer the same thing, though I do worry that we might find the on-premises version of many products becoming second class citizens. Vendors will spend less on development and support if too many customers move to the cloud.

Steve Jones

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April 29, 2014

If we can do it, so can you

We hear constantly about the benefits, and potential pitfalls of cloud based applications. There are certainly reasons to move to the cloud, or stay away, depending on your particular situation and requirements. However one thing I hadn’t thought was viable was software development in the cloud. Most of the companies I’ve seen that host applications in the cloud still do the development on desktops and laptops, with a build server somewhere on site. However Microsoft wants to show us that this isn’t necessary.

There is a push inside Microsoft to perform more of their development in the cloud. Across the last year or two, various managers inside Microsoft have been moving development to the cloud, typically starting with testing and code analysis. Those are great fits for cloud services, since they are used at discrete periods, but may requite lots of resources. One of the interesting things in the piece was that the first objectives was to speed up the continuous integration process. At Red Gate (my employer), we’ve seen a lot of benefits from implementing continuous integration, both in our applications and databases, and we’ve done a lot of work to smooth out those processes.

Obviously Microsoft might have an advantage over many of our other companies in terms of Azure resources and cost, but I would bet the reliability is similar for their developers. If they can make it work, on products like Windows, SQL Server, Sharepoint and more, I’d think that many of us could make use of the platform as well. I know a few people that have worked with TFS on Azure, and they’ve been pleased with the performance and reliability. There are any number of other software services, like GitHub, that make use of distributed, cloud-based services for software development.

However even if you don’t want to use the Azure platform, the idea of using virtual systems, of spinning up and down the machines you need to perform various functions makes lots of sense. You can make better use of your hardware resources, and even schedule continuous integration services (builds, tests, analysis) for different teams (or applications) at different times, improving your efficiency and not only speeding up your development processes, but hopefully improving the quality of the final code.

Steve Jones

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September 16, 2013

Exploring a Database in Azure

After creating my Azure account, I wasn’t sure where to go next. Fortunately I had an immediate project that occupied my attention: a public Adventureworks database.

As we noted, Red Gate and SQLServerCentral agreed to host the database and cover costs. Once Jamie Thomson transferred the database to my subscription, which didn’t seem too hard, although slightly confusing, it showed up in my list of objects.

I drilled down to the sql databases to ensure this was the only object there, and it was.

I wasn’t sure what I could do, so I clicked on the database. I do tend to be an RTFM guy at the beginning, but I was curious how easy they’ve made things. This is what I saw:

It’s a good list of things, although since I have SSDT installed, I didn’t need the first item. I guess if you have SSDT installed you would know it, and the link is handy. The interesting thing for me was the “Server” string at the bottom of the panel.

I wonder if it works.

Jamie had given me the admin name and password, and I plugged this into Management Studio, along with the connection string.

Sure enough, it connected, and changing to the AdventureWorks2012 database, I could query the objects.

I decided to test Object Explorer as well, and that was interesting. I had a very cut down version of what I normally see for a SQL Server instance.

Most of the “instance” level stuff was gone. I could see the master database, and my own database, but no others.

Since this was a new instance, one of the first things I decided to do was create my own login account. I right clicked “Logins” and selected “New Login”. I go this:

A template for a script. That’s interesting. No GUI version of the login creation dialog. I used CTRL+Shift+M to fill in the template stuff.

That’s not my password, but I did choose a nice, long one. I executed the script to create a login and then went to add a user. Once again, I got a script from the GUI.

I changed this and created my user to map to my login.

This let me log into the system, and set myself as a db_owner. However I wasn’t an administrator. That’s for another post.

May 30, 2013