When creating a "web app" it is common to use a wildcard domain and have each client or instance of the web app on its own sub domain. Windows Azure does this themselves, for example "yourwebsite.windowsazure.net". For some unknown reason, wildcard subdomain support seems to not be there for Windows Azure Websites. I'm very frustrated with this fact, so much so as to abandon Windows Azure all together.
Is there a work around to not having to manually enter every domain name individually that you want authorized? Is there an API for this? I have a particularly hairy requirement in that I have over 100,000 sub domains I would need to do this for before I could even consider moving to Azure.
Please look deeply into this issue if you attempt to answer it as I have already and saw no other option other than manually entering through the portal.
I suspect that you're right, and that Windows Azure Web Sites don't support this. You could, however, use a Cloud Service with a web role.
Related
I've got my Node.JS bot builder chatbot all working in the emulator, but I'm not sure how I can get started in allowing my bot to be chatted to by others through the internet, on a web page.
I've seen this article, but this seems to be if we want to host the both through Azure. Additionally, I'm not sure how I'd link the code I made for the bot with this.
This is for a school project for a local company, so I'm fairly sure (and will ask) that they want this to be free to run on their own servers, instead of paying Microsoft.
Can anyone help me understand how this all works?
If you're using MS Botframework & LUIS, you will have to host your webhook somewhere to make it accessible to public. Now, if you do not want to spend a penny for hosting services, I'd like to suggest you one more bot platform dialogflow.com (api.ai) where they have built-in inline editor (Powered by Cloud Functions for Firebase). You will just have to write your code there & say deploy. You won't be charged unless you're using a standard edition.
Now, second thing, if you do not want to do any of these & still want to make it public, you will have to have your own servers & all & expose your IP. Put that computer in the DMZ of your router. That is what it is for. Or, simply forward the needed ports. But here you will have to manage everything on your own like if a server goes down etc. Hope this helps.
Quick question. I'm currently moving a asp.net MVC web application to the Windows Azure platform. Everything is working out okay apart from one thing.
In the application at the moment, we make use of FTP accounts for each user to import large quantities of files to our database.
I understand FTP on Azure is not as straightforward.
I've googled and found this article: Ftp on Azure
This seems to be what I need except obviously we'll need to be able to add new users with their own separate FTP account. Does anyone know of an easy workaround for this?
Thanks in advance
Did you consider running a (FTP) service that's not IIS based, and you could add users programatically? Also, how are you going to solve data sync issues when the role recycles or when you upgrade it? Make sure to backup to blob on a somewhat regular basis!
Personally, I'd mount a VHD drive (Azure Drive) which is actually hosted on blob storage, and have my FTP server point to that drive. However, make sure you only have one instance of the server (problem #1) unless you don't need higher than 99,9% reliability you can solve this by running a single instance. Step 2 is I'd implement user management in relation to that program.
It's not straightforward, and I'd advise against it though. But I understand that sometimes you have to do this. I would solve it like I described above.
I'm researching some Windows Azure stuff, in order to make a decision whether to move to Azure or not.
Basic information
To answer the question, you'll need some basic understanding of my app so here goes.
The app is an ASP.NET MVC 3 application that connects to a SQL Server database.
It is a single instance application, meaning that every customer eventually has their own instance of the app running on our server, deployed to IIS 7 as a website.
I have one SQL Server, where each instance has its own database.
I also have a set of Windows Services to do some background processing. That should be straight forward, as I'll just rewrite those to use a Worker Role in Windows Azure - most of the logic in the services is located in their own class (library) anyway, so the service it self just calls one or more methods in a class.
Now to the question
Whenever someone signs up for a free trial, I add a record to an Admin database I have.
I then have a Windows Service that deploys a new instance of the ASP.NET MVC 3 app to IIS, grants permission to a few folders, runs the database deployment script and updates the record to reflect that it has now been deployed, and finally sends an e-mail to the prospect that their free trial has been created - here's how you access it.
So, how can I deploy a new instance in Windows Azure from a Worker Role? Preferably, I'd just add a new website to an existing Azure instance and create a new SQL Azure database for that particular site to use.
Does this require a lot of work to set up? Is it even possible?
Based on two quotes, I would like to suggest calling this a multi-tenant application:
It is a single instance application, meaning that every customer eventually has their own instance of the app running on our server,
And...
a Windows Service that deploys a new instance of the ASP.NET MVC 3 app to IIS, grants permission to a few folders
If I understand correctly, there is "one" IIS server (well, in Windows Azure, it's one Web Role, scalable to multiple instances), and with each new "tenant", you set up some new stuff to support that tenant.
If that's indeed the case, you can definitely do this from a worker role - just look at Nate Totten's multi-tenant web role blog post and related code. Look at the webdeploy code that actually manipulates IIS.
Further: take a look at Cloud Ninja, a project a few of my teammates published along with Fullscale180. This is a multi-tenant app that demonstrates how to manage multiple customers in a single deployment, as well as monitoring and scaling.
Finally: should you need to actually create brand new service hosts and storage accounts, the latest updates to the Windows Azure Management API support this.
I hope that helps a bit...
I think most of the things you want to achieve are possible.
It will definitely require some work to setup!
For some ideas on how to achieve what you are looking for, take a look at the MS SaaS example - http://www.fabrikamshipping.com/ - especially designed for porting existing apps to SaaS on Azure. Inside this app they have an "onboarding process" - and that process includes setting up new SQL connections and new portals.
There's lots of good blogging (watch the video) about this on http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vbertocci/archive/2010/10/07/new-online-demo-introducing-fabrikamshipping-saas.aspx
I heard that apps don’t port directly and they have to be specifically written to work with Azure. I’m new to Azure and did some reading but I don’t see anything from their site or documentation that suggests that you must specifically code for Azure, so is it true?
If this question is better suited for another StackExchange site please let me know.
You should take a look at the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit to see some introductory project labs.
While you theoretically can just "drop in" some apps into a Windows Azure VM, it hardly makes sense to do so. Some apps can be migrated with only minor changes, such as an asp.net website - session state is easily handled by AppFabric Cache, and the Web Role VM is Windows Server 2008 with Full IIS. However, you'd still need to integrate with Windows Azure Diagnostics, to be able to have external visibility to the health of your app.
Further, with the example above, there are more optimal things you can do, such as moving static content to blob storage, and taking load off your VMs. This requires you to upload this content, and then change your IMG and other tag URLs to point to a slightly-different URL.
Just remember that you're moving to Windows Azure to take advantage of its platform and related services, not just to be a rack to host a server. To take advantages of these services, you're going to have to target them specifically, such as:
Access control services
Caching
Connectivity (vpn, service bus)
Diagnostics
Database (SQL Azure)
Synchronization services
Traffic management across data centers
This is somewhat true. Your apps will typically run as-is. You just need to add an azure project to the solution, and add your MVC apps as roles to the Azure Project.
I found O'Reilly's "Programming Windows Azure" to be a good conceptual introduction to Azure.
I am a web developer that are working on several web applications. For my projects (running in a production environment), I always strive good performance.
So, I have started to look into Microsoft Azure. I have deployed some test-apps and they all work fine. They all run a lot quicker than on my regular shared hosting environment.
My questions are:
1. What should be ran at Azure? Are you suppose to deploy your whole web app (along with images, scripts etc) or are you just suppose to deploy services? (such as WCF)
2. It says "Data transfers within a sub region are free.", but what is a sub region?
3. CNAME works, but is it possible to use A-records of a domain to Azure?
For web sites that are just jQuery slabs calling web services Azure is very easy to adopt. Azure can store any type of file, so for traditional web sites follow this guide
Azure process to Azure process, or Azure SQL etc. May included other non Azure services within the same Microsoft network area. Basically they are saying LAN access if free, whoopee
What would you point you A-Name too? Azure is virtual
Here are the answers I can give you:
It depends on what you want and what kind of (web)application you want to build for Windows Azure. If you're going for fast performance, perhaps it is faster to deploy everything to the cloud (but face the financial costs)
A sub-regio is North-Europe, another one is West-Europe. So data transfering inside North-Europe will be free of charges. But if you have data transfering between North- and West-European hosted application/services you pay for this.
Note: North- and West-Europe form 1 region
Sorry, can't give an answer to this one
Azure is definitely geared to handle more than just hosting web services.
Putting all your web site's static content in Azure storage should enable you to take advantage of the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, which basically replicates your static content out to geo-local caches at the edge of the cloud to reduce network load on your Windows Azure web roles and improves the responsiveness of your web app for your end users scattered around the world.
Read more about the Windows Azure CDN here: http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazure/archive/2009/11/05/introducing-the-windows-azure-content-delivery-network.aspx