Going live with Windows Azure
Posted on June 8th, 2009
So of course you’re only going to do this if you’re nuts … right? Remember that I never said I wasn’t!
Here is the application that I needed to host. In my mind a perfect candidate for a compute cloud. It is basically a second stage monitoring service. I have various services deployed in other data centers. If one fails or goes offline the server it is on will restart it. (Stage 1) – but what if the entire server is down? This is my second service, every few minutes it checks data in the cloud (AMZ) for last contact times from a bunch of services. If anything has checked in within 5 minutes … bamb! I get some critical email warnings.
The application consisted of a Worker Role that does the monitoring and then a Web Role. This is used to expose a REST API to my mobile applications so that status information can also be pulled at any time. Due to the 1 project limit currently on Azure I bundled these two roles into one package.
Deployment was a snap. Just upload the package and configuration files and it hits staging without issue. Azure allows a staging to production promotion which is great. I hit the promote and then run buttons and all was well – the service deployed and run without issue.
It has been running without any noticed downtime for a few days now. Today a service outside Azure happened to fail and I received my email, awesome. Some notes about Azure so far:
- The only errors always seem to be from the actual web admin tool. You get the usual MS generic error and you have just try again.
- On one occasion the application said it was promoted to production and running but the DNS for the Web Role failed to register.
- The web admin site is too slow.
That is all for now. Next I’ll be testing the data services! I love Amazon’s high speed de-normalized database so looking for something similar.
Tags: Azure, Deployment
Filed under General |