I would like use a continuous integration system in my projects. However, I don't want to use a server sitting in my office, instead I'd like my continuous integration server to run on Windows Azure. Has anyone set this up? Are there recipes to host Hudson or CruiseControl.Net (or any other CI system) within Azure?
We use the Build Manager in Team Foundation Server to push our automated builds to Azure. We set up our Azure hosted services to allow for Web Publish through remote desktop using this plugin - http://dunnry.com/blog/2010/12/20/UsingWebDeployWithWindowsAzure.aspx
You do not need to involve Team Foundation Server to use the plugin - you can set up your instances to publish to azure instantaneously through Visual Studio Web Publish without CI.
I think there are two parts to the Azure CI solution - automated builds from your source control and actually pushing the bits to azure. The plugin makes the publish to Azure much, much faster. So if you want real time access to changes on Azure, you will need to look into the plugin.
It sounds like you are trying to use Azure as an infrastructure provider, which runs a VM where your builds happen.
This is not a particularly good use-case for Azure. Azure is a platform to run your custom-built applications. While it does provide VM's similarly to Amazon or other IaaS cloud providers, those VM's are "stateless", can go up and down at will and meant to act as application servers where more than one can be up at any given time.
You can probably get this to work on an Azure VM but I am not sure if the pain would be worth it.
Azure's instances are application servers, not "windows servers".
HTH
I have installed Jenkins on Windows Azure, it works very well for me.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/gongcheng/archive/2013/02/27/jenkins-on-windows-azure-the-missing-manual.aspx
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How can I publish to an Azure Website (NO VM!) using Microsoft Release Management.
At the moment, ms release management only seems to support deploying to Azure VM's. I like MS Release Management system as it lets me control my deployment variables across multiple deployment stages.
Basically, this is not a supported scenario out of the box.
Your best bet here is to use an agent-based release template with a "springboard" server to manage the release, and custom PowerShell scripts that use the Azure SDK to interact with Azure. One of my colleagues did the leg work to figure it out a few months ago, and has a few comprehensive blog posts describing how he accomplished deploying an Azure Web Application via RM.
Visual Studio Release Management now offers built-in steps to manage Azure App Services. In a Release Management process add the Azure App Service Deploy step, and configure for your website. Note that this step requires your site to be published as a .zip file.
In addition to the deploy step, it is best practice to deploy to an inactive slot, or stop / start the site using the Azure App Service Manage steps in Release Management.
For now, you should take a look at the new build system, it has an out of box task to deploy a package to azure web app.
Deploying apps to Windows Azure Websites feels incredibly more convenient compared to the initial WebRole option. Being able to push through Git, and get the app restarted in ~20s is a massive improvement over the 15min role redeploy.
Thus, I am considering using this option for what used to be hosted in WorkerRole as well. Indeed, it's possible to allocate a full VM to run WA website.
Are there any gotcha to be aware of when attempting this? Obviously, as the name suggests, WA websites are not intended for backoffice processing.
In an upcoming feature for Windows Azure Websites, the scenario you're referring to will be supported:
http://github.com/projectkudu/kudu/wiki/Web-jobs
The following will allow you to have 2 types of processes to run aside your website:
Triggered - Start your process on a scheduled (or manual) basis.
Continuous - Your process will always be on (if it goes, it brings it back up).
Regarding the differences between Azure Webrole and Azure Website, there's a different question:
What is the difference between an Azure Web Site and an Azure Web Role
Cloud Services gives you two different environments: staging and production. You can also use Continous deployment with Git, Tfs, Codeplex, Dropbox too. But if you don't need this two environments, you can go with websites.
Using a Virtual Machine, you'll be responsible for the operating system, runtime, data and also your app (obviously). Just be aware that you'll have to apply the service packs / security packs by yourself. If your app doesn't use 3rd party components I don't see a reason to use a VM for that.
I am new to Windows Azure and need help with deploying my Azure application, which is correctly deployed to Azure, to a local server.
My application consists of one Web Role, which contains a Silverlight client for a Silverlight application.
I installed and configured windows server appfabric on the server and the server is actually ready. But I don't know how can I deploy/publish the application.
To deploy to Azure, i created the .cspkg file using the publish option in the right click on Azure application. And then deployed the generated files to Azure using azure management portal. how can i do something like that for the local server?
Windows Azure provides an emulator environment that runs on your development machine. You may either run a Windows Azure app in that emulator, or publish to Windows Azure. There's no option to deploy a Windows Azure application to Windows Server.
While some of the services offered are similar (such as cache), Windows Server AppFabric is not equivalent to the services provided by Windows Azure, and there's no equivalent fabric controller that runs on Windows Server.
EDIT: Adding clarification per #Asmaa's comments.
Building a private cloud is not the same as creating a local version of Windows Azure. The Private Cloud you reference is essentially a set of Windows Servers running virtual machines managed by Hyper-V, and some type of local storage. You'd be fully responsible for replication, disaster recovery, durable storage (where storage survives even with a disk crash), scaling, etc.
Windows Azure provides the abovementioned features, but only within its data centers. As #Avkash mentioned, there is a Windows Azure Appliance, but it there are only a handful in existence and they're huge (as in made for a data center).
If the objective is to run your code either locally or in Windows Azure, this can be done, but not by pushing the Windows Azure package to your Windows Servers. You'd need to build separate solutions to run your code in the two environments. You can reuse your core code if it's packaged correctly, but the notion of the Role Environment, Diagnostics, and other Windows Azure features would need to be replaced with something else.
One last thing: if you want to build a hybrid app, where some of it is deployed locally and some to Windows Azure, then there are certainly ways to bridge the two. See this article for more info.
The bottom line is that you can not deploy Azure Application to Windows Server machines in your own data center and David added all the info needed on this context. However, I just want to add little more as you are new to Windows Azure. I can understand why you are trying to do something like this and because I have had similar conversation with other partners in past, I believe this information is useful.
The main why you couldn't do it because Windows Azure main components i.e. Compute, Storage, Networking and other value added services which are built upon main component are just not available in your machine however, there is a lot more to it.
Windows Azure Appliance is a product which can be deployed to any Data Center and currently used by Dell, eBay, Fujitsu and HP as described in this link. Windows Azure and Windows Azure Appliance are not exactly same, however, Windows Azure Appliance does have a similar model of Compute, package deployment, Storage, Management portal and functionality. So when available to general public this could be a choice for data centers to have something similar to Azure running in their premise however it is currently available to only very limited partners.
We are starting to build out some new tech and I want to know if it is possible to cross develop a web app to run natively in Azure (ie, use Azure specific stuff like storage) but also run locally on our test servers and accommodate internal deployments natively on IIS?
I know I can host them from a dev box in a simulated Azure environment and I know that I can interface the Azure parts out and write in non-azure counterparts. It just seems like this should be a solved problem.
If you want to run Azure applications on-premises (and using non-development Azure storage), you must run a Microsoft Private Cloud. It requires special hardware and licensing costs, so don't expect it to run on what you have today.
I'd just like to know if its possible to deploy a web project, that usually runs on the windows azure cloud, to a normal windows server 2008 pc for testing purposes?
It depends what you're trying to test - if it's just the web app, why not map a virtual directory to the folder? If you're not using any of the Azure features (eg Queues), then can run it standalone as a normal asp.net application through IIS
No. There is no 'on premise' version of Azure and the only way you could do it is if you ran a dev environment on the server and ran the app in the Azure dev fabric.
I would suggest that for testing you should test on the cloud anyway as it is somewhat different to the local fabric. The big advantage of testing and the cloud is that you can spin up and shut down instances whenever you need, so it only costs money while you are actually testing. You might even be able to do most of your testing within the 'free' 25 hour allocation
Microsoft provide emulators to test a lot of the azure functionality locally including:
Compute emulator: very nice as allows you test app with multiple instances running
Storage Emulator: provide emulation of blob, table and queue storage
SQL Express can be used inplace of SQL azure but you need to be aware it is a superset of SQL Azure
The parts that arent emulated are:
Caching Service (very annoying really)
CDN (again a bit annoying)
So it depends on which azure services you are using as to how well you can test locally.