Is there a way to execute some script on Azure Web Role Instances ? I am kind off new to Azure and Azure Management APIs.
Basically what i want to achieve is, depending on the environment type, i would like to switch ON/OFF couple of services in all Azure Web Role Instances. So for e.g. if i have a single web role with 5 instances, then the script should execute in all the 5 instances.
Determine the staging/production environment
Get all the web roles for staging and production environment
For each role get all the instances
Run script in all instances (remotely)
Any help here would be much appreciated.
EDIT: I am able to fetch the staging/production environment details and the web role details for each environment as well. I am using the Service Management Rest APIs and the Get Cloud Service Properties method:
https://management.core.windows.net//services/hostedservices/?embed-detail=true
The above URL returns a list of role instance with their IP address.
But when i am trying to hit the Cloud Service (Web API) it is giving 404 error. Not sure if we can use the IP to hit a web api project hosted on IIS.
Thanks in advance,
Jash
Not exactly sure what you are trying to achieve. But if you have a Cloud Service with Web/Worker roles you cannot directly access each individual instance from the Internet. There is an Azure load balancer that sits in front of your deployment and routes Internet requests to instances. This would be useful for you to read.
What you can do, however, is to implement RoleEntryPoint class exactly like you would do for a Worker Role. Then you could check at regular intervals for a trigger - say a Blob in a container, a record in Table Storage, etc. When this happens - decide what to do: fetch special URL from Localhost, directly execute script with Process.Start(). Your choice, you have full control. All you have to do is to add a new class in your Web project that inherits from RoleEntryPoint.
You can refer to this resources for a bit more information on the use of RoleEntryPoint in WebRole projects:
https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazure/Combine-WorkerRole-and-f97d0487
http://blog.syntaxc4.net/post/2011/04/13/windows-azure-role-startup-life-cycle.aspx
Related
I have an Azure Cloud Service out in production. I recently received the following message from Microsoft about upcoming service for their Cloud Services platform:
All Cloud Services running web and/or worker roles referenced below will experience downtime during this maintenance. Cloud Services with two or more role instances in different upgrade domains will have external connectivity at least 99.95 percent of the time. Please note that the SLA guaranteeing service availability only applies to services that are deployed with more than one instance per role. Azure updates one upgrade domain at a time. For more information about distribution of roles across upgrade domains and the update process, please visit the Update an Azure Service webpage.
The way I take the email, each instance is essentially a VM on a different host, and they'll be rebooting hosts throughout the maintentance period, so if I don't want to be out of service during this time, I need to ensure I have more than one instance. Is this accurate? If so, how do I "add" an instance?
That is correct.
You can increase your instance count by updating the configuration for the role. In Visual Studio, you can do this in the Properties window for the role and increase the Instance count setting. Then, redeploy the service.
A faster way is to download the configuration file (.cscfg) for the role from the Azure portal, update the instance count setting, and then upload the changed configuration file. The setting is in the Instances element shown here.
You can download the configuration file for the role from the Azure portal (portal.azure.com) by going to the Cloud Service blade and clicking on Settings in the toolbar. In the Settings blade click Configuration. In the Configuration blade are where you will find Download and Upload buttons in the toolbar.
The way I take the email, each instance is essentially a VM on a
different host, and they'll be rebooting hosts throughout the
maintentance period, so if I don't want to be out of service during
this time, I need to ensure I have more than one instance. Is this
accurate?
Your understanding is correct.
If so, how do I "add" an instance?
There are many ways to do it.
One would be to edit your role's configuration file (*.cscfg) and changing the Instances element's count property from 1 to 2 and then uploading this file through Azure Portal (Cloud Service --> Configure Tab --> Upload button)
Other one would be to change the instance count through "Scale" tab for Cloud Service in question. On this tab, you will see "Instance Count" setting. Just update it from 1 to 2.
Other options include PowerShell, writing code but I think the ones I mentioned above should be the easiest way to accomplish the task.
I created my custom Azure Worker Role. This code is ready. What I'm trying to do is to create instances of this Azure-Worker-Role in specific Azure data-center, at the requested time. For example, I'm want to send command to Azure to create 10 instances of my Custom-Azure-Worker in West-Europe data-center - now.
It's important to pass this command also a parameter that will be the input problem to be solved by my workers.
I pretty sure that this automation task must be covered by Azure automation. Is that true? Looking for more information\directions.
Thank you!
You can use Azure Management Libraries to create and deploy your cloud services from C# code. Just create application (eg ASP.NET MVC) to manage your cloud services by sending commands and deploy it also on Azure or even keep it locally.
See this article for more details http://www.bradygaster.com/post/getting-started-with-the-windows-azure-management-libraries
You'll want to leverage the service management API to spin up and tear down roles. It can be accessed any number of way, including directly via REST.
RE: providing a parameter to the worker role, one option is leveraging the cloud service configuration file that you provide with the cspkg. Define specifics for the role there.
Depending on the complexity or simplicity of your scenario, you may also get away with simply having a table in storage that you personally poke with desired configuration values and that the worker can read to retrieve.
The Azure Automation service should definitely be able to automate this task for you. Anything you can script via the Azure PowerShell module, can be imported as a runbook and called manually, via a third-party system, or on a schedule in Azure Automation.
Whether there is an existing runbook for the specific task you are looking to automate, I do not know. But Azure Automation has a gallery of community-contributed content for many common processes, so this may be available there.
We are thinking of using Windows Azure for simulation. ~100 VM nodes each working on it's problem set and reporting back the result to a Master node.
I have created VM instances from the web UI. In order for this to work, we would need to use Azure API to bring servers up and shut them down once they are done.
Does anyone have any experience with something like this? I am looking for advise, gotchas etc.
thanks.
You sure can do it and I have helped other to make it happen on hundreds on nodes. Take a look at Windows Azure Rest API to configure your role as described here. While others may have other idea, I think the general steps would be as below:
Create a master machine or a webrole to manage your roles using REST API
Create a worker role instance and use it to clone multiple instances as if needed
Use REST API to start and shutdown worker role along with update the instance count when in need
Use Azure Boot Strapper to bootstrap the VM depend on your requirement
Azure REST based Service Management API can work from a web app or a standalone app, so you can also have a web role to make it happen from anywhere in world. This way you don't need any on premise components at all as it will be totally cloud solution. If you need any help on creating web role I sure can help.
You can provision Virtual Machines using Service Management REST API (there's also a managed API on NuGet).
But in your case you might want to consider using Cloud Services (PaaS). With Cloud Services you simply build your application, you package it and deploy it. Then using the portal or the management API you can simply configure the number of instances. There is even a command line tool (csmanage.exe) which allows you to to change the number of instances through the service configuration.
I'm curious to know if this is possible, and if so, is it a good or bad idea?
We are developing an Azure application that is largely centered around worker roles that receive their work on a CloudQueue, and put the results in a CloudBlob, that the client then downloads. The web interface itself is a dead-simple ASP.NET MVC site that throws jobs in the CloudQueue, and builds URLs to download CloudBlobs.
Currently we accomplish this by having a Azure Cloud Project in our solution, which has a Web Role with the UI, and Worker Roles with the actual work.
Could we use Azure Websites to publish and host the UI, which calls back to our Worker Roles? The Azure DLLs are just regular old .NET libraries, I'm assuming Azure Websites won't have a problem with them. So, when we want to update the UI, we just publish with Visual Studio. And when we want to update the Worker Role - which is 300MB+ and has a bunch of nasty dependencies like Crystal Reports - we can build the cloud bundle and update the Cloud Service through the Azure management portal.
This seems to me like doing this would make it easier to update the UI. I think it would also be cheaper to host it, as we won't have to buy a bunch of instances for the Web Role.
If your question is "Could we use Windows Azure Websites*", based on your application architecture, you sure can use Azure Website to deploy your front end and configure all the networking connection properly so you can continue access other Azure Storage services. As you are using mostly Blob and Queue, you can continue use HTTP/HTTPS settings in the Azure websites. You can keep worker role by as it is however if it is very complex to deploy, using Windows Azure VM may be another direction to go.
I could say website deployment could be easier if your web app does not have something complex to configure in web server as websites may not be able to match web server level configuration compare to webrole and Azure VM. Answering "Easier and cheap" could be very subjective as this is all depend on load and distribution so you would have to try and evaluate it.
I'm looking into moving an existing app to Azure. It will have an MVC app in one web role and some WCF services in another web role. When live, the site will live at http://www.myapp.com and the services will be at http://api.myapp.com with the MVC app configured to point to the services at http://api.myapp.com.
The problem is when pushing the app to the "stage" configuration on Azure. My understanding is that each push to stage will cause the services to live at a new url (something random like http://4aa5ae2071324585ba5a902f4242a98c.cloudapp.net/). In this case, what is the best way for my MVC app to discover the url of the services?
One option would be to setup a dns entry like http://stage.api.myapp.com and update my DNS CNAME record to point to the new Azure staging url every time I push to stage, but... yuck.
Another option would be to push to stage, get the new urls for the services, RDC to each instance of the MVC role and manually update the configurations. Also yuck.
Is there a simple way to do this? I know I could automate some of the steps above with something like PowerShell, but I'm really hoping there's something baked into the Azure framework that makes this easy. It seems like it would be such a standard scenario.
The only way to dynamically discover what the staging URL will be is to have the instance check its own deploymentID. I am assuming here that the MVC website and the WCF service are in the same deployment. If you check the RoleEnvironment.DeploymentID, you will find that this corresponds exactly to the 'random' URL used in staging (i.e. http://[deploymentID].cloudapp.net).
As long as you are dynamically creating the ChannelFactory on the clientside, it should be able to take its own DeploymentID and find the staging URL.
Of course, this is only useful when deployed in staging. Why don't you simply use the Production slot? That name is stable and you can rely on it or the CNAME (more likely) that you set for it. You can always have multiple hosted services (dev, QA, prod, etc.) and just use the production slot on them.
Don't do what #dunnry is suggesting! Azure has a really good concept of endpoints that solve your problem. And you have access to this info from your RoleEnvironment class.
You can take a look at my blog post on how to get the endpoint from the client. The key part is to create an internal endpoint at which your WCF service is listening. Keep in mind though, you don't necessarily need a new role for this, and personally, I would rather host it in IIS alongide the original Web role & have two of these roles for improved reliability.
This way, it doesn't matter what the deployment is, because the service communication will take place inside that deployment, be it staging or production.