I have several App Services in Azure: development, test, and production. I would like to share some application settings between them like variable sets in Octopus.
Let's say I have a key A which should be same in all App Services. I would like to set its value in one place but seems that I have to configure it to each App Service. When A is changed, I have to change it to everywhere instead of having one common place to change it. Is there some way to do this?
No built-in way, app settings are part of the App Service resource.
You will need to put the settings in a common database or file.
Azure Key Vault can be used for sensitive settings and table storage/blob storage works well for other settings. Azure SQL is also an option.
Your app will then need to load these settings at startup.
This is also a documented cloud design pattern: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/external-configuration-store
Related
I have an application that consists of a few different Azure App Service apps all running on the same App Service Plan. I am sending telemetry data from all the apps to one instance of Application Insights (backed by one LogAnalytics instance). In the requests and traces I am trying to determine the best way to differentiate the logs between different services.
I plan on setting the cloudRoleName per app which will help, but there is also a cloudRoleInstace number which is populated automatically with something like dw0********P9.
How can I find which app this number refers to? I cant find the number on the app service portal page anywhere.
Azure set some environment vars that Applications Insights will consume, if present.
Take a look at docs:
Azure App Service Environment variables
You can check the source code either, where appInsights is reading the values of environments vars:
AppInsights Config.ts
After the post above from #Jone Polvora. I was able to decipher that the number in the cloud_RoleInstance field is visible from the environment page within Kudu for the app. It is the machine name on that page but also set as the following environment variables by default.
COMPUTERNAME and USERNAME
There are probably no less than 150 different configuration options for an instance/application of Azure App Service Web Apps. This is only part of the list and each of these items have various options and inputs.
Authentication/Authorization
Application insights
Managed service identity
Backups
Networking settings
Scaling settings
WebJobs
Push
MySQL in App
easy tables
data connections
API definitions
CORS settings
... etc, etc
From a configuration management perspective, how do I either source control these settings (preferred) in a config file or use a configuration management tool to manage them?
I don't see a way to define the individual apps in an ARM template.
My goal is to have a consistent and repeatable application configuration across multiple applications and prevent mistakes with manual setup.
Per my understanding, the settings you mentioned includes the whole configurations of the web app, like Deployment slots, Backups, etc.
AFAIK, you may not be able to control them(at least like Deployment slots, Backups,etc) via the ways you mentioned.
My goal is to have a consistent and repeatable application configuration across multiple applications and prevent mistakes with manual setup.
Currently, the closest way is to clone web app, you could use it via the portal or powershell, but it could not support clone the whole configurations in the web app even if you use it.
Also note: App cloning is currently only supported for premium tier app service plans.
My web.config contains multiple entries in "appSettings" (e.g.: twilio account key). One of these is for the asp.net chart control. It's the configuration part that states where the images the control generates are to be stored.
All of these settings work on my development machine. That is, i can connect to twilio and the chart control stores image in memory (as it should, according to the settings).
When i publish the site to my azure website (using vs), all of the settings work, apart from the chart control one. The chart control behaves as if the setting isn't even there. (it defaults to c:\TempImageFiles for storage).
I looked into the published version of the web.config and the setting is there. Only, it's beeing ignored.
My next attempt was to add that setting using the portal. (It's possible to add appSettings for a web app using the portal). I copied the exact same setting from web.config into the portal settings. This worked, so there is nothing wrong with what's in the settings.
So my question is: Why are some (at least this one) settings from web.config ignored when the app runs inside an azure web app?
You might have an app setting defined in the Web App's configuration with an identical name that overrides the web.config setting. This is typically done to have production settings stored in Azure instead of Web.config.
You can confirm if this is the case by opening your Web App's blade in the new portal, and checking the Application Settings tab there.
azure websites / azure web app service are typical web applications running on top of azure PaaS infrastructure. So whatever storage allocated to the service is accessible from the app. But it cannot be the typical C: or D: where in a regular server the app may have complete access. Mostly the C: space is allocated for IIS hosting. D:\local is something you can utilize as the app will have complete read and write access.
Please refer azure web app service sandbox details here.
If you are accessing the path via code try using Server.MapPath property to get access to the path. options like Path.GetTempPath() will not work.
One point to note is, any local storage in azure PaaS services is to be treated like a temporary storage. Whenever the site, service or role recycles the storage will be gone a fresh storage will be assigned.
We are experimenting with deploying an MVC app as an Azure web role. Currently the app is being hosted locally on our server. It has a few appSettings in Web.Config that can be changed by the users as part of the "Administration" module of the application.
I know this isn't a good practice for Azure because there will potentially be multiple instances of the application running with multiple Web.Configs, which makes updating them all a nightmare (if not impossible). My understanding is that the ConfigurationSettings specified in the service definition should be used instead of Web.Config so that settings are defined globally in one place that all the instances of the application can access.
My question is is it possible to programmatically update ConfigurationSettings similar to the way we update Web.Config settings, or would it be better for us to move those settings into a database or something else?
Yes, but unfortunately it is definitely not simple to do.
Follow this URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee460809.aspx
It talks about a Svc Management API call that you can make to read/write the Service Configuration. It is a 64-base string which you'll need to decode, find XML flags in it that you want to change and re-encode it back and send it back to the API.
Not pleasant, but doable.
I'm trying to make a service to more easily configure configuration values on Azure applications. Right now, if I want to change a setting that it the same over 7 different environments, I have to change it in 7 different .cscfg files.
My thought is I can create a webservice, that the application will query for its configuration values. The webservice will look in a storage place, like Azure Tables, and return the correct configuration values.
I've been able to integrate this into a deployment script pretty easily (package the app, get the settings, change the cscfg file, deploy). The problem with that is every time you want to change a setting, you have to redeploy.
Finally the question - Is there a way I can retrieve the configuration settings after the application starts, on role start? It would of course need a base set of settings for the app to start. Retrieving the settings from the web service on application start would be good. Any way that I don't have to redeploy the application and that it will retrieve them automatically will work.
Thanks in advance!
Just use the .cscfg for the minimum set (common to all environment) of configurable settings. The use your web services for rest of the configurations. And don't modify your .cscfg. Just have a settings provider that retrieves settings from web service (via polling or message signalling - pub/sub model). And have a reinitialize settings procedure in place for this settings provider and all the services/components that rely on configurable settings.