The Challenge

As developers, we deal with lots of complexity, and this is a good thing. It forces us to be creative, and sometimes to go beyond our known universe to overcome challenges.

Microsoft Azure is designed to help us make the right choices. It imposes performance targets through a multitude of mechanisms like throttling and quotas. One of which, I’m sure you have come to know, is that we cannot scale a Cloud Service to zero instances. Let’s stop for a moment and think about this limitation for a second. How would you creatively overcome this challenge?

Moving a Service to Microsoft Azure

Having written about lifting and shifting a Console Application, I decided to mirror the scenario and describe how a similar method can be used to lift and shift a Windows Service to Microsoft Azure.

Every time I dig a little deeper into Azure, I’m amazed at how much there is to know. Having done a few projects with Cloud Services in the past, I thought it would be interesting to see if it was possible to lift and shift a Windows Service into an Azure Worker Role.

Lift and Shift: The action of moving a workload to a new environment, without altering the application’s code.

Scaling Azure Cloud Services

When we build applications on the cloud, we usually favor scaling-out over scaling-up. Consequently, scaling in and out is supported out of the box on Microsoft Azure. On rare occasions, there is a business need to scale-up during peak hours and to scale-down for the quiet hours. This blog post will show you how to achieve this with the help of Microsoft Azure Automation and with PowerShell.

Keep in mind, that scaling up and down requires us to be creative.

Moving to Microsoft Azure

Every time I dig a little deeper into Azure, I’m amazed at how much there is to know. Having done a few projects with Cloud Services in the past, I thought it would be interesting to see if it was possible to lift and shift a Console Application into an Azure Worker Role.

Lift and Shift: The action of moving a workload to a new environment, without altering the application’s code.

How do You Version Packages?

This topic seems to come up regularly. And is usually a friction point for teams because many of us do this differently. In an attempt to standardize versioning and to remove this undesired friction I decided to promote Semantic Versioning (http://semver.org/).