I'm a single developer working on an idea I'd like to deploy to windows azure, however my main issue is I couldn't find any good learning resources for individual developers working alone. Does anyone have any recommendations? I've got the azure platform training kit, but from what I can tell, it's intended more for teams of developers learning at the same time.
As the prior owner, I can tell you that the platform training kit was targeting to anyone looking to learn about the platform - not just teams. If I was trying to get up to speed, I would sit down and start on the hands on labs, but I am biased towards the kit.
Cory keeps an updated list of 'Essential Windows Azure Resources' I would take a look at as well, there are some good items in it.
Take a look at the book "Azure in Action"
I found the Cloud cover show at channel 9 very helpful in my learning. Try it
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Is it possible to learn Azure practical skills without paying or providing my card info?
I found out about the https://portal.azure.com/. And about the modular tutorials https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/browse/?products=azure. But I am not sure whether or not it will be feasible for me to cover all important for the commercial development topics with just the free resources above.
Maybe there are other ways to learn Azure profoundly without paying or providing my card info? It is an important question for me, because I really want to learn Azure a lot, but if there is no free plan to learn it, then I will have to pick something else (e.g. AWS or Heroku).
Here learning Azure implies being able to access theoretical knowledge base and documentation (both of which I am sure are present) and also being able to use a fully free (and without any card info) sandbox environment. And the question is a doubt that such a free sandbox environment exists.
The Microsoft Learn resource is very good and free. I use it all the time. However, not every learning module is free. Some require an account. This might be around 5% that require your own Azure account.
Can you learn Azure for free with Microsoft Learn? Absolutely YES. There are almost 1,000 modules on the site to choose from. I recommend this site even for very experienced Azure developers. For example, the VPN Gateway modules are free to practice with.
Microsoft Learn
After a while I was able to come over the Azure sandboxes. And that is what I was looking for in the question. E.g. this article explains how to use them.
I am an azure customer and i have had very bad experiences with the support so far. The developer support ($25/month) does not help with server outages because they take 8 hours to respond.. and since everyone is in india or some foreign country, that means all i get is an email, so i respond and wait another 8 hours for a response.. theres really know way to get an issue resolved any faster than 2 days it seems.
So my question, what are your personal opinions/experiences of the azure premiere support ($300-$1000/month) vs developer support? Is premiere support American engineers or still from india? Are the engineers more knowledgabe or are they the same as developer support but faster response time? And opinions would be helpful (i have the link to Microsoft's website, i want real info from people who have used it, not sales talk :) )
#kwill stated:
Every time you open a support incident the first communication you
receive from the support engineer will include their normal working
hours along with instructions on how to get support from another
engineer in a time zone that more closely matches yours.
From personal experience I can tell you this:
While this may very well be true, however, the first communication with the support engineer is the tricky part. The last ticket we created, after almost a week we're still waiting on that first communication with a support engineer which had expected response: 4h ; This is with a Gold support account.
I used all service plans (Developer > Premium), not only Azure but also a few Microsoft products (e.g. SharePoint). First of all, I'm not going to criticize Microsoft service supports but most of the paid tickets I raised give me NOT good experience.
Note that Developer support plan aims to help basic troubleshooting. I'm unsure if you are given an experienced engineer (or you are lucky enough) but the first level is support escalation engineer. I have no idea with this role but per my experience, people with this role have no developer background. They have skills in system, network and IT background enough to kind of understand what you encounter, and may answer general questions. In the loop of email also has a few people to monitor the case.
Standard Plan is quite similar to Developer plan. The difference is the support time (24 x 7) because Microsoft engages people from different shifting time zone. The role is still Support Escalation Engineer.
Professional Direct is quite more professional and has experience with the specific Azure service you encounter. This person may come from Premier Field Engineer (PFE) team who understands the service and also have good troubleshooting skills. You are asked as deep as possible so they can drill down to see the root cause.
Premier Support is more to consulting, architecture and code review. If you encounter system or application error when working with Azure, I don't recommend you to pick this plan. Go with Professional Direct plan is enough. Premier Support also has (but rarely) PFE guys engaged. Role engaged mostly is Consultant and Architect (not Cloud Solutions Architect).
My experience (mostly):
I was shared many long articles (from Microsoft Docs for Azure) which even had obsolete information, missing guidance or unclear points without indicating which I should pay attention to. And you know articles from here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ have so many issues (e.g. wrong API version, wrong configuration, invalid class,invalid directive, poor documented SDK sample....)
Developer and Standard Plan would not give much value. Slow response and no consensus (someone handles case then off business hour. Another one takes over and asks what is encountered again). Such a loop resulted waste of time.
Professional Support gives best practices of DOING, or DESIGN, without actually understanding the scenario. Every design has a reason and decision consideration. It's not just giving a documentation then recommend to follow.
Premier Support: it is good but don't really expect something so high. Sometimes your customer asks you to open Premier Support ticket to JUST get confirmation of valid architecture design or coding pattern from Microsoft.
Again, I really love Microsoft and would like to make it better by giving positive feedback.
Kris, the Azure support team is a 24x7 global team with engineers in every region of the world, including the United States. The US based team is the largest team since that is the time of day when the majority of incidents are submitted. All of the support plan options, severities and response times, and email/phone options are available at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/plans/.
Every time you open a support incident the first communication you receive from the support engineer will include their normal working hours along with instructions on how to get support from another engineer in a time zone that more closely matches yours.
If you ever feel that you are not getting extremely high quality support you can always ask to speak to that engineer's manager, at which time a manager and an escalation engineer will review the incident to make sure you are getting everything you need.
I just spent the last two hours trying to walk through Microsoft's "Web Services and Identity in Windows Azure Exercise 1: Using Windows Identity Foundation with a WCF Service in Windows Azure" which purports to show how to host a secured WCF service in Azure.
Unfortunately, the walkthrough is ridiculously complicated with a whopping 151 steps. I've tried to complete the first part of the walkthrough 3 separate times but without any luck. I'm pretty sure I'm following the instructions exactly as written but there's so much subtlety in there (certificate setup, configuration chaanges, etc.) that it's likely that I'm missing a critical detail. In either case 151 steps is clearly an order of magnitude too difficult for mere mortals to follow.
Anyway, any help in this rgard would be greatly appreciated....
Check out the BidNow sample. That is a lot less complicated. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/BidNowSample
Also, check out the samples on http://acs.codeplex.com/
There's a pretty good article walking through this in the December 2010 MSDN Magazine - the fact that it's titled "Re-Introducing the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service" says a lot. You have to "re-introduce" things that no one understood or used when you "introduced" it. :)
I toyed around with Azure in January this year and though it looked great in theory, I wasn't even able to deploy a simple dummy application due to various bugs I encountered.
I'd like to have another look, however I don't want to spend another two days in vain. If you have recently tried Azure, I would be interested to hear about your experiences.
Thanks,
Adrian
Yes, Xbox Live, Microsoft's BPOS suite, Live Messenger, and more all run on Azure.
If it can run Xbox Live, it can run your production app.
I'm using Azure for production stuff, and I've found it reliable, but pretty hard work. Hard work because:
The reference documentation is minimalist. Many functions are covered by a one sentence explanation and no examples.
While being much better than nothing, not everything that works on the development fabric will work on production.
When things go wrong (especially when a role keeps recycling) it can be hard to work out what the problem is, although remote desktop can help a lot.
Windows Azure works for us and allows to deploy rather complex business solutions with rather impressive auto-scaling capabilities.
We have already migrated all of the major projects towards Azure so far.
If still in doubt, take a look at 50+ case studies here.
Visual Studio 2010 added a BUNCH of functionality towards Azure development. I think it is enough to move Azure up to snuff for production apps.
However, if you don't have Studio 2010, I would wait till you can get it.
Another example that I like (I was personally involved a teeny weeny bit so I'm biased :) ). All Twitter/Facebook results on Bing.com are piped through an engine that runs on Windows Azure. It consumes multiple realtime feeds and surfaces them on Bing. You can do the math on the scale since it is crunching on all of Twitter's data and has been doing so for months
I am looking for a simple system to manage inbound emails from a support mailbox for a group with about 3 support people. I've looked at OTRS which seems to have the features that we need. Unfortunately, so far the UI still looks like a confusing mess.
Are there any good FOSS tools that would meet this need? I've heard murmurings that something called fooogzeeebugzo might have similar features, but it seems quite expensive for such simple needs.
Did you try IssueBurner? It was designed for this purpose. You can forward your mailbox (e.g. support#yourcompany.com) to a IssueBurner group and you can track the inbound mails until they are closed.
Here is a link to their video: http://issueburner.com/a/video
I have to agree, Fogbugz is probably the best out there. I have used both the hosted version and the purchased version which I hosted. It is top-notch.
BugTracker.NET is free, open source, and widely used. It has integration with incoming email. In other words, it will accept an incoming email and turn it into a support ticket.
My company recently started using Mojo Helpdesk: www.mojohelpdesk.com. It's a hosted service, not FOSS, but it's pretty cheap and the interface is slick.
TicketDesk- C# issue tracking system and support system
http://www.codeplex.com/TicketDesk
TicketDesk is efficient and designed to do only one thing, facilitate communications between help desk staff and end users. The overriding design goal is to be as simple and frictionless for both users and help desk staff as is possible.
TicketDesk is an asp.net web application written in C# targeting the .net 3.5 framework. It includes a simple database with support for SQL 2005 Express or SQL Server 2005. It can leverage SQL server for membership and role based security or integrate with windows authentication and Active Directory groups.
RT - Request Tracker handles inbound mail. I'm working to add inbound mail support to TicketDesk, but that might be a little while before that makes it into a release.
FogBugz is great as others have mentioned. I use it for my bug/feature tracking system, but I like to separate out my support ticketing system for my support staff to use. Another tool that has great email integration also is called HelpSpot, they have hosted and non-hosted versions for purchase, depending on your budget. It has a lot of great features, that make the prices worth it. Take the tour and see for yourself.
Scope out SmarterTrack, Help Desk Software from SmarterTools:
We use FogBugz...er, "fooogzeeebugzo"...and while it may be a bit expensive for your needs, it works very well.
bugzilla is more of an issue tracker than a request tracker, but it can be configured to handle email-based status tracking. That said, I think Steven has it- RT is the standard recommendation for this that I've seen.
The on-demand version of Fogbugz is a pretty cheap option for just a few people, and works really well. We did that for a while before moving it inhouse.
I've used fogbugz for over 12 months now and more and more I'm finding one of the most valuable features is the in built email support. I've got an on demand account and I'm finding more and more that I don't even check my email in the morning as all my business correspondence is put straight into fogbugz.
I realize that FOSS is your primary desire and I definitely agree with this. If I were to limit myself to FOSS, I would go with RT 3.8, http://blog.bestpractical.com/2008/07/today-were-rele.html#screenshots
However, if you are willing to entertain commercial solutions and are looking for a Helpdesk-"ish" application. I just deployed WebHelpDesk with great success at my current employment, where I am the primary sysadmin and Corporate IT person. They just released a new version, 9.1.1 and it is very well done. The email integration is superb and beyond what I have seen with most other FOSS and commercial issue/bug trackers, given that it is built to run a Helpdesk and not be a software or source code issue tracker. It runs on Windows and *nix, they have a great demo and you can obtain a 30 day trial installer. I have become a big fan of this software and think it has a reasonable price of $250/year/technician (support person).
If you want more info on how we deployed it, please email me and I'd be happy to discuss it at length. I have no more connection with them than I am a very happy customer.
Thanks for all the tips. For the moment, I am looking heavily at eTicket as it was trivial to setup and seems to be developing nicely at the moment. I may look at RT as well, though.
I'll second the suggestion for RT. See my post here for more thoughts and details on our setup.
From my personal experience I can recommend using Bridgetrak.
It works pretty smooth in our environment and includes rich helpdesk functionality for powerful tickets tracking.
I have a lot of experience using this tools - feel free to ask any questions!
As most of the answers are a little bit outdated, I would definitely recommend OsTicket (http://osticket.com/), a great open source project that offers lots of customization and a user friendly interface.
I have been using it for the last two years and I would rather choose OsTicket than OTRS or RT.