Creating an On Premise Database and MVC Web Application and Migrating to Windows Azure and SQL Azure-Step 9 of 10

Previous Posts that you should review Step 1 https://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2010/06/12/creating-an-on-premise-database-and-mvc-web-application-and-migrating-to-windows-azure-and-sql-azure-step-1-of-10.aspx Step 2 https://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2010/06/11/creating-an-on-premise-database-and-mvc-web-application-and-migrating-to-windows-azure-and-sql-azure.aspx Step 3 https://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2010/06/27/creating-an-on-premise-database-and-mvc-web-application-and-migrating-to-windows-azure-and-sql-azure-step-3-of-10.aspx Step 4 https://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2010/06/28/creating-an-on-premise-database-and-mvc-web-application-and-migrating-to-windows-azure-and-sql-azure-step-4-of-10.aspx Step 5 https://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2010/06/28/creating-an-on-premise-database-and-mvc-web-application-and-migrating-to-windows-azure-and-sql-azure-step-5-of-10.aspx Step 6 https://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2010/06/30/creating-an-on-premise-database-and-mvc-web-application-and-migrating-to-windows-azure-and-sql-azure-step-6-of-10.aspx Step 7 https://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2010/07/01/creating-an-on-premise-database-and-mvc-web-application-and-migrating-to-windows-azure-and-sql-azure-step-7-of-10.aspx Step 8 https://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2010/07/02/creating-an-on-premise-database-and-mvc-web-application-and-migrating-to-windows-azure-and-sql-azure-step-8-of-10.aspx

 

This Blog Post is about…

	Publishing your MVC application as a hosted application in Windows Azure
	Navigating to the Windows Azure Portal
	Understanding your application "package" and "configuration" files
	Creating a "hosted service"
	Defining a "Public Service Name"
	Defining a region where your application will run
	Choosing between "production" and "staging"
	Uploading the packaged application and configuration files to the portal
	Running your application

 

 

How to publish your application A simple right-mouse clickAs you know, your cloud-based MVC application is comprised of two projects: The configuration project (MvcAzure) The MVC Application project (MvcAzure_WebRole)

What happens when you publish?   2 things will occur You will automatically be navigated to the Azure Web Portal (so you can upload your application) Two files will be generated (the first is your packaged application and second file that is generated is the configuration file)

The Azure Web Portal The assumption is that you have obtained an Azure AccountBeing able to deploy your application to the cloud requires that you have a valid Azure account. You can sign up here: https://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/

Publishing your project creates 2 files

Creating a “new service”

You will provide a label here  This is for the developer, not the end userThis string will be used to identify the application within the Windows Azure web portal

Check for Availability  Mapping your own custom domainsYou can use CNAME record mapping to map your own domain name to your Windows Azure “Public Service Name.” https://blog.smarx.com/posts/custom-domain-names-in-windows-azure

 

CNAME creation

Create a CNAME Essentially, you will need to create a CNAME record mapping the “www” subdomain (as in www.brunoterkaly.com) to my Windows Azure application (brunomvcapp.cloudapp.net).

Staging or Production?   What is the difference between staging and production The Azure Portal has two deployment environments, Staging and Production. You will want to use Staging first to verify your application works correctly before deploying it in to Production When you are ready to deploy in to Production, you can move or swap your Staging code by clicking the “arrow” icon in between the two environments

Ready to “Run”   Changing StatesAfter clicking “Run” your application will go through various states. Initializing Busy Ready

What happens when you click “Run”   The Fabric ControllerThe Azure Fabric Controller (FC) is the service which monitors, maintains and provisions machines to host the applications that we (the developer) create and store in the Microsoft cloud. https://azure.snagy.name/blog/?p=89 Here is the just some of the steps There is an agent on this OS that knows how to find and talk to the Azure Fabric Controller. The FC then tells the agent to prepare a host partition. The agent then downloads a Hyper-V enabled version of Windows Server 2008 Core (since the host OS should be as lightweight as possible). This VHD is read-only and only contains the basics... https://azure.snagy.name/blog/?tag=fabric-controller

Finally, we are done !   Click on the “Web Site URL” By now we have finished building and deploying our application. Both the data and the MVC Application is running fully in the cloud. If additional scale is needed, we can change the “Instance Count,” as described in one of my previous posts. Although the database can grow to 50GB in size, you may want to devise some sort of sharding logic. Sharding can be challenging and essentially involves the horizontal partitioning of data. Database sharding is a technique for scaling out SQL databases and has started to gain mindshare amongst developers. What is sharding? Sharding is easily explained by a simple single table example. Lets say you have a large customer table that you want to split into two shards. You can create the shards by having all of the customers who’s names start with ‘A’ up to ‘L’ in one database and another for those from ‘M’ to ‘Z’.