I've just created a bot service on Azure and it looks completely different from what I got last time. Back then I ended up with a bunch of CSX files. Now it has created what looks like a full blown ASP.NET app (see screenshot).
How many different backends are there these days? C#, CSX and NodeJS or is CSX no longer a thing?
Found the answer. It depends on the plan you are using for the bot. For my example above I used regular plan. If (during creation) "consumption plan" is selected, the bot will be based on CSX files. This behaviour is described here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/bot-framework/azure-bot-service-debug-bot
The consumption plan serverless C# environment in Azure Bot Service
has more in common with Node.js than a typical C# application because
it requires a runtime host, much like the Node engine. In Azure, the
runtime is part of the hosting environment in the cloud, but you must
replicate that environment locally on your desktop.
Related
I have an application written in Node.js that I am deploying to the IBM Cloud infrastructure. Everything works great as long as I have the environment variables for the app embedded in my manifest.yml file. This isn't ideal since it keeps these secure values within my GitHub repository.
I use a .env file for my local testing and placing that in my .gitignore is great to ensure that it doesn't roll out to the Git repo, but having to place the values into my manifest really defeats the purpose.
Is there a way to ensure that my environment variables are kept between CI runs that I store on my IBM Cloud apps without resorting to storing them in the manifest?
If you are using Cloud Foundry, then I would recommend to take a look at how Cloud Foundry integrates with services. It allows to bind a service to an app, thereby making the credentials available. If you already have some services, like another database, you can utilize the concept of user-provided service. There is no need to set variables, it is managed by Cloud Foundry.
Those concepts integrate well with the Continuous Delivery service on IBM Cloud.
where you run continuous integration? if you run on IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery you can set Environment Variable and provide access to your job to access it.
you can see the documentation in here.
I developed a SDK.js that ease the use of my API supported by my nodejs server on Azure.
What would be the best way to deploy this SDK.js to the server so that client can make use of it after having it embedded in their code via a tag?
Note: I'd like my SDK.js to be babelled and minified in the process.
As far as where to put the file, there are two options I can recommend: either in a public endpoint or by leveraging Azure Storage.
As for deployment, one solution is to include it in whatever deployment process the API. If you are looking for an outside solution, there are a large number out there, but two that will make the process as simple as possible that I am aware of are Azure Devops and Github Actions. Of those two, Github Actions has a larger free tier if your project is small.
Recently I've started experimenting and getting familiar with some of the Azure offerings. I made a simple app, connected it with azure functions and azure storage as well as some other offerings like service bus for example.
So far so good, the app is working great and I got my feet wet with some great Azure services.
But now I'm unsure on how best to proceed because what I have so far is a development version of my app. If I wanted to make a prod version do I have to provision a different set of all the azure resources used for the dev version?
So basically, I would have mydevsite.azurewebsites.net and myprodsite.azurewebsites.net. Is this correct? I can restrict mydevsite.azurewebsites.net with some IP address restrictions so that is not publicly available but I still feel this is a hacky way of doing this and that there should be a better way.
Is there a common approach to a scenario like this?
This is a bit of a broad question, but I can tell how I have done it before.
A common setup would be three environments, Dev, Test and Production.
Dev mostly runs on the developer's machine (as much as it can). We use a local IIS installation to run the web app, and a local SQL Server as a database. Azure Storage and Cosmos DB can also be emulated locally. Certain services like Search for example can't be run locally so you would have to run those in Azure anyway.
Test and Production are basically two identical resource groups with the same resources, just configured slightly differently. So double the App Service Plans, SQL databases etc.
Depending on how you want to do it though, you can of course share resources across environments. But it is a good idea to somehow make sure they do not accidentally use the other environment's stuff. And the definite bad side of this is that you are putting production data in the same place as test data, which frankly should not be together.
I know some organizations run a Dev environment fully in Azure. There can be a couple reasons for this: very heavy environment which can't really run on dev machines, or they want to test ARM template deployment at dev stage too.
Having duplicated services allows you to use ARM templates for automatically deploying and updating the infrastructure, which is pretty nice.
If you are on Standard or higher, you might think to use Deployment Slots in App Service for different environments, but they are really not meant for that purpose. We use them to reduce application downtime when deploying a new version, and as a fallback if the update turns out bad. So the deployment goes to a "staging" deployment slot, which gets swapped with the other one, and the new version is live. We then stop the deployment slot so we are not running the older version in the background unnecessarily.
But otherwise we have a separate App Service Plan with separate Web Apps with their own staging slots.
Deployment slots documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/web-sites-staged-publishing
I am currently looking into using ARM to deploy new environments of our Azure Components. We have a lot of web apis that are deployed to Cloud Services, since we need access to the underlying OS to get CPU usage for App Dynamics metrics. When reading through ARM, it seems as if they are deprecating Cloud Services, but I have some confusion about what is replacing it. I see that you can create Web Apps using this and use Publish from Visual Studio to deploy the app it, but I see no options for Cloud Services. So what is the preferred method to do this? Creating a VM and deploying using Web Deploy? What about VM scaling. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
My company is in the process of moving a legacy app to Azure using Cloud Services and we were concerned about the future of Cloud Services. Since we are somewhat early into the project and would like to use the ARM model we thought it would be easier to make a move now if we knew the future. After a few conversations with project leads at Microsoft on this topic we were only told that we should continue working with Cloud Services as they would continue to be supported.
It's quite clear that the move to ARM was not well thought out in terms of direction and consequences of existing services that many people are already using. Reading between the lines I would say that there is no plan to convert Cloud Services from the ASM to ARM model.
If application insights (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/application-insights/) are sufficient for your monitoring needs, then you can use web apps. These can be deployed via ARM, and can automatically deploy from a git repo or web deploy package. See this example:
https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/tree/master/201-web-app-github-deploy
The issue here that you may be trying to do operations which are restricted by the web app sandbox.
Failing that, you can use an ARM template to set up a VM and then invoke a custom site extension which will run powershell code to do further provisioning. This powershell code can fetch any package that you may want to install. See this ARM template for example: https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/tree/9ad72f1f5f0008c14311be79eee036b871712394/201-list-storage-keys-windows-vm
Once the VM is created you would be able to modify it and scale as needed.
Just getting used to VS2012 publishing of Cloud Services. At present I have a one instance webrole which contains a MVC3 application. I can publish it to Azure without issue, and it creates the Cloud Service>Web Role>VMs. Fine. Takes a little while.
However when I do a little code change how can I migrate just this code change without replacing all the VMs that implement the WebRole etc.
It seems that Code and infrastructure are inseparable, or have I misunderstood. Is there a way to just update the code bit?
Thanks.
When you roll out an update, you upload an entire package containing not only your code files, but also the configuration for the VM, such as # of instances, ports to open on the firewall, local resources to allocate, etc. These configuration settings are part of the code package - so there is more going on than just updating code files.
However, there are a couple of methods you can use to have more granular control over updates.
Use Web Deploy. One thing to keep in mind, is that any automatic service updates will restore your website to the last fully-deployed package, which may not be as up-to-date. You would only want to use this in staging, then do a full package update for production rollout.
Use an Azure Web Site instead, which allows continuous integration with your source control provider, and direct updates to the code.
Use an Iaas VM instead. These are basically the same as running your own custom server in the Azure cloud, and you have full control over the OS. However, you also have full responsibility for keeping the OS updated and secure.
You can also enable RDP to your Azure Web Role VM's. You will find all your code files there and IIS, but I wouldn't recommend updating your code this way for the same reasons listed in #1.
The code and infrastructure, in a cloud service, are actually separate. All you upload is a deployment package containing just your code and supporting libraries / files. You don't upload a vhd. Azure provides that for you, spinning up a vhd, and then accessing your code on a file folder on that vhd. Same process happens each time you scale out to more instances.
when you make a code change, you build a new deployment package and deploy that. If you do it as an in-place update (vs delete+redeploy), each role is updated on each instance (when you have multiple instances of a role, they're not all updated at the same time). You can even specify that you only want a single role within the deployment to be updated (helpful if, say, you have a worker role in addition to your web role, and want to leave all the worker role instances running).
when the code update happens, the VMs aren't replaced, but they are recycled, and when they start back up, they are running the updated code.
You can use WebDeploy with Cloud Services in production across multiple servers using the AzureWebFarm project (disclaimer: I maintain it).
Alternatively, you can also use the excellent Octopus Deploy deployment technology in conjunction with the AzureWebFarm.OctopusDeploy project (disclaimer: I maintain this one too).
To be honest though, if you just have a simple web app then I wouldn't both with cloud services - I'd just use Web Sites. Feel free to check out my blog post to see the situations which might force you to use cloud services though.
If you enable WebDeploy on the cloud service, you can use web deploy to publish the MVC application.
See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ff683672.aspx for details.
All of the above answers are correct and if you are trying to change your code for a production service you definitely want to do an in place upgrade as described. However, frequently during the dev/test phase or troubleshooting I want to make one small change and test it out quickly. To do this check out http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kwill/archive/2013/09/05/how-to-modify-a-running-azure-service.aspx which describes how to modify the code via RDP to the Azure VM.