Over the last few years, people have increasingly been adopting containers. But to use containers at a large scale, you need to use an orchestrator to ease the administration of your applications. Kubernetes is the most popular orchestrator and, while there are many concepts you need to learn to make the most of it, the benefits of using Kubernetes are …
Microsoft’s cloud-based platform Azure has helped many businesses expand and cut back on their costs associated with hosting and storing data on a traditional server. Furthermore, the platform has given developers a chance to create, manage, and deploy powerful applications capable of assisting cloud customers to perform any number of tasks. From handwriting recognition to text sentiment analysis and Bing …
Azure has plenty of services for hosting your applications and their components. It also has extensive options for deploying to these services. Barry Luijbregts introduces four of the primary options for hosting apps in his article, “Which Azure Deployment Model Should You Use? 4 Ways to Deploy.” In that post, Luijbregts covers where to deploy on Azure; in this post, I’m …
A chatbot is an application that simulates a human responding to the user. It’s a more natural way to interact with a system by using conversation. Let’s say, for example, that you want to order a pizza. Instead of wasting your time tapping randomly or searching the Internet to figure out how to use the app, you could just start …
_ How do you test that a feature in your application actually works? Or that it is actually being used? Usually, you’d perform lots of tests in separate environments, like a QA or Acceptance environment. Or you’d route a certain percentage of your production traffic to the new version of your site to test if and how usage of your new …
In order to release quickly and have stable application environments with minimal errors, it is of vital importance that developers work well with IT operations people and vice versa. To do this, they need to communicate well and sometimes work in the same team. Ideally, they work in the same environment. Makes sense right? This is called DevOps. DevOps is …
 Azure SQL Database is one of the most used services in Microsoft Azure, and I use it a lot in my projects. It is basically SQL Server in the cloud, but fully managed and more intelligent. There is another service in Azure that is kind of similar, but not quite: Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Azure SQL Data Warehouse uses a …
If you are thinking about using Azure Functions, at some point you will be confronted with the challenge of figuring out how application logging works. Logging in Azure Functions has some unique challenges due to the stateless nature of the serverless execution model. In this article, we will cover some basics about Azure Functions and provide instruction on how to …
We are living in a golden age of programming. The language and tooling have never been better. Not a day goes by that I’m not impressed by some new programming language feature (how cool are nullable reference types in C#?); or a new technology (Live Share and Teletype are going to change the lives of remote developers); or some adaptation …
Working with containers provides a lot of benefits. They are a lot faster to spin up and shut down than virtual machines. They run everywhere, which gives you the benefit of having the exact same environment locally as in production. And because they run everywhere, you can run them in any cloud or on-premises, which prevents you from being locked …
Almost every application these days communicates over HTTP: websites, RESTful services, and even SOAP APIs all make use of Hypertext Transfer Protocol. For the most part, we don’t worry too much about what is happening at the network level when we’re building these applications. However, from time to time a problem will show up that needs us to drop to …
Microsoft Azure is a beast of a cloud platform. It’s arguably the only true competitor to AWS, even though Amazon had a 4-year head start on building their cloud. What Microsoft has created is truly impressive, and all signs point to the Azure vs. AWS debate being far from over. If you’ve decided on Azure as your cloud platform, you …
Microsoft Azure is a great platform to use and it has many services and features. But how do you go about deploying your applications to the cloud and using them? There are several different options for deploying your applications in the Azure cloud and which one(s) you use and where you run them depends on the amount of control and …
Azure Event Grid is an awesome new service in Azure, which connects applications together through event messaging. This way of working decouples application components, which enables more scalability, maintainability, and extensibility. The image below illustrates this. Orders are written in and Azure Cosmos DB database. Event Grid reacts to each new order and publishes that as an event and the …
I’ve always dreamt of being able to do facial recognition in one of my apps, but it always seemed too difficult to do. Facial recognition is complicated, it is something that much smarter people than me come up with. Now, with Azure Cognitive Services, I can easily add facial recognition to my app by just calling an API. Plus, I …
Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS, is a cloud computing model which provides outsourced computing infrastructure to users and organizations. It can provide users with resources that include servers, network connections, storage, and features like content delivery networks and load balancing. IaaS providers maintain the equipment, while users rent or buy the specific services that they need. The term for …
Microsoft Azure is huge! There are so many services that it is sometimes hard to determine which ones you should use when. This is also true when it comes to storing your data in Azure. There are many different services in Azure that you can use to store your data in, but which one is right for you? Obviously, the …
Azure Cloud Services and App Service made it relatively easy to run web applications in the cloud. Developers still need a simple way to run tasks on a schedule at pre-defined  times or specific intervals . We commonly use simple console apps via the Windows Task Scheduler to handle these needs. WebJobs were released as part of Azure App Service …
The Microsoft Azure cloud offers a lot of services for almost every scenario that you might need. You can categorize these services into cloud computing types like IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to determine the amount of control and responsibility you have versus the time you can spend on building things that matter. Let me explain these types a bit further: …
Cloud monitoring is the process of evaluating, monitoring, and managing cloud-based services, applications, and infrastructure. Companies utilize various application monitoring tools to monitor cloud-based applications. Here’s a look at how it works and best practices for success. Types of Cloud Services to Monitor There are multiple types of cloud services to monitor. Cloud monitoring is not just about monitoring servers hosted …
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