Advanced features of Azure Storage

Azure Storage offers many useful features and services that make integration into existing systems easier. New solutions can take advantage of these features on an architectural level. Knowing which common patterns are natively supported by Azure Storage can radically accelerate development. Here is an overview of them. Read more ›

An Alternative to Let’s Encrypt for Azure Web Apps

Configuring Let’s Encrypt certificates for Azure Web Apps was always a pain. One would expect a simple single-click solution. It took four years until Microsoft delivered this feature. It is named App Service Managed Certificates, and it will issue a certificate for your custom domains at no cost. This feature is available for customers with a Basic App Service Plan and above. Naked domains or wildcards are not supported. Read more ›

The Growth of Azure Datacenters in Europe

European companies will soon have a much wider range of Azure regions. Besides the 6 current Azure regions in Europe – Amsterdam (West Europe), Dublin (North Europe), London (UK South), Cardiff (UK West), Paris (France Central), and Marseille (France South) – another 8 regions will be available. Microsoft will operate 11 Azure regions in North America and 14 regions in Europe. Another 13 regions are located in Asia. Read more ›

Upcoming Breaking Change in Service Fabric 6.5

Removing node state will not be possible when the node is a seed node since Service Fabric 6.5. It will be necessary to convert the seed node into a non-seed node prior to node state removal. It is not yet known how to convert seed nodes into non-seed nodes. It will be possible to opt out of this limitation in the cluster configuration. Detailed guidance will be available when Service Fabric version 6.5 is released. Read more ›

Working with Azure Batch

Azure Batch is a very practical and highly customizable service. It is one of the Azure Compute services designed for performing compute-intensive or data-intensive tasks. Azure Batch combined with Azure Storage is a pair of draft horses that can handle unusual workloads. Setup is very easy, and the program interface is intuitive and easy to code against. There is even an API to retrieve files from the working directory of your application. Read more ›

Why is the Application Insights TrackMetric method missing?

The short answer is that the method is missing because someone in the development team forgot to use an Obsolete attribute. This method in the TelemetryClient class in the Microsoft.ApplicationInsights NuGet package is used very often. After the latest update of the package, it just disappeared. Surprisingly, the method isn’t listed in IntelliSense, but the older code where this method is used can be successfully compiled without any error or warning. Read more ›

Microsoft Announces Its Own Content Delivery Network

Microsoft Azure provided two Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) – Akamai and Verizon. Today, customers can choose one more provider – Microsoft. The price is half that of the other CDNs, but the service is in preview. Microsoft offers similar features to the others: HTTPS endpoint, custom domain certificate, content purge, compression, geo-filtering, and core analytics. Read more ›

Azure Portal: Hmmm… Looks Like Something Went Wrong

Azure Portal sometimes fails to load. It has happened to me several times. It was always caused by exceeding the quota of HTML5 Local Storage. The solution is as simple as clearing the storage and navigating to the portal again. Microsoft Edge contains hidden Developer Tools that help with tasks like this. You can also delete your entire browsing history, but it will affect all websites, not just Azure Portal. Read more ›

Memory Leaks Symptoms & Causes in Service Fabric Reliable Services

Memory leaks are hard to detect and can cause serious problems. While a single job task running for a few seconds doesn’t have to care about them, a service running 24 hours a day must be carefully tuned to successfully fulfill its job. Moreover, memory leaks don’t have to be detected straight away; they usually appear as another exception, pointing you to problems in a different area. Let’s look at one example of a memory leak and how it showed up. Read more ›

Keep Your Service Running Forever by Designing an Instant Shutdown

Over a year of designing and moving several services from Azure Cloud Service to Service Fabric taught me a few things that are important to keep in mind when creating or refactoring microservices hosted in a Service Fabric environment. Don’t forget that Service Fabric patterns are tightly coupled to .NET, which has gone through a massive paradigm shift. You must be up-to-date at least with asynchronous programming to be able to code solid services. Read more ›

Health Monitoring of the Service Fabric App Upgrade

Deploying an update of any application can be risky because new code may contain new bugs. Unit testing is an advisable method of reducing the risk. However, some mechanisms depend on workload. Some workloads can be simulated more easily than others. Service Fabric provides health monitoring after the new application version is deployed to the cluster. If the new version is not healthy, the old version is rolled back automatically. Setting up protection against failures caused by upgrades is relatively easy. Read more ›

How to Secure Service Fabric Cluster with an X.509 Certificate

You probably noticed that Service Fabric Explorer is publicly accessible and does not require any username or password. Service Fabric Explorer allows monitoring and management actions like disabling nodes or application deletion. The cluster and its management can be easily secured with an X.509 self-signed certificate. After that, the certificate is required to access Service Fabric Explorer or publish applications to the cluster. Read more ›