Getting started with Azure Container Instances

Hot off the press! The new Azure Container Instances service is a new offering (still in Preview) from Azure that allows you to launch and run your Docker Images in less than 10 seconds. In this post, I'll show you how to get started and what you need in order to be able to leverage the service. Prerequisites In order to follow along you'll need the following: An active Azure Subscription A machine that has the following installed Azure CLI Docker .NET Core (if you want to deploy a .NET Core app). Alternatively, node or any platform you wish to …[read more]

Query Profiling on Azure SQL

Azure SQL is one of the most valuable Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings on Azure, second only to Web Apps. It's incredibly cost effective and fully featured. It supports a number of database versions and can be deployed in seconds. The other day I was looking to test something with EF Core and I needed a database to run queries against. I went to the Azure portal, I created a database with prepopulated data using the AdventureWorks (Datawarehouse Workload - DW) and I was ready to connect and run my queries in less than 2 minutes. If you use …[read more]

Deploying your code to production doesn't have to hurt

This blog post is at the back of a conversation I had on Twitter with a few people about how (not) to deploy code to an environment. It all started after reading a blog post by Jesse Liberty with the title Azure For Developers – Part 3: Deploying from Visual Studio. I have huge respect for Jesse and I know he's been around for much longer than I've been. However, I felt that he omitted something very important from his blog post. The fact that although deploying from Visual Studio works great and is super convenient, this is something that should …[read more]

Azure Functions, Node.js and Environment Variables

Another fun project (yes another one) using 2 of my favourite frameworks: serverless with Azure Functions and Node.js. I'm developing locally using the Azure Functions Core Tools (former CLI) and Visual Studio Code. It's a match made in heaven as I get to be super productive using the CLI and at the same time feel like a proper developer debugging issues in VS Code. I can attest that I don't have a single Console.log() in my JavaScript code. Since this is a real-life project, I get to do more than just simple "hello world" samples and slowly but …[read more]

Deploy your ASP.NET Core app to Azure Service Fabric

Service Fabric is Azure's highly scalable, multi-node, always-on solution that's designed to make deployment and running of distributed micro-services (and not only) a breeze. It provides a lot of features and functionality out of the box, allowing you to focus on the business value of your solution instead of the architectural and design decisions that could delay your path to production/market. There's great, impartial set of articles on micro-services published by Microsoft, along many, so if you want a crash course introduction, then I would urge you to have a read here. This is not the one true source …[read more]