Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

There are two new features of Azure Storage that will make the end of 2017 very interesting. New Archiving Tier A new archiving tier is now available for blob storage. Additional to Cool and Hot access tiers we have now Archive tier. In contrast to the existing ones, it was design for situations when you need to archive data for long periods. An interesting fact, in comparison with Cool storage is related to SLA. The availability SLA is the same as for Cool storage – 99%, in the context of a tier that is it secure and durable as Cool storage, but it is much cost efficient. From what I see know is more than 5 times cheaper than Cool storage. The new tier comes in hand-in-hand with the current trend of moving existing infrastructures to Azure. In many situations, there are cases when because of regulatory aspects, you need an archiving solutions for audit data. Audit data needs to be stored for at least 5 years. With the current price of Hot and Cool tier, it was hard to do someth...

In this post, I will try to find answers and guidance for technical people that needs to decide if they shall use .NET Core or .NET Framework inside Docker containers on Azure. The same answer is applicable for on-premises, because Docker runs in the same way on Azure or on-premises. The directions from Microsoft related to this topic are clear. The default option shall be .NET Core. From this way, .NET Core is design in a such a way that is align with container concepts. For example the footprint was reduced drastically in comparison with .NET Framework. One interesting fact that people do not know is related to the type of Windows image that you need to use when you use .NET Core or .NET Framework together with containers. When you use .NET Framework you need to use a Windows Server Core. This image is heavier than Windows Nano Server. This can have a direct impact at infrastructure and resources requirements. There are many things to say why Windows Nano Server is better, a few ...

Another year passed as Microsoft Azure MVP and I realize that this is the 6th year as Microsoft MVP. It is a pleasure to be part of MVP Community, that has extraordinary people that are ready to help and offer support to any community all around the world. I’m honored and exited to be part of this great community for one more year!

Nowadays IoT is appealing for everyone. These opportunities made the two biggest cloud providers from the market (Amazon and Microsoft) to come up IoT platforms and solutions. The main purpose this this article is to compare the current solutions from features perspective and capabilities perspective. The interesting thing that happened in the last few years is the way how IoT solution evolved. At the beginning the solutions were oriented around transport and communication, but now the IoT platforms evolved and are integrated with systems that runs on the edge and in the cloud, supporting the business needs. X-Rays Let’s take a look on the available solutions that Amazon and Microsoft offers. Both providers are offering a central Hub that is used to establish and facilitate a communication between devices and backend systems. At device level, each provider is offering a set of package libraries that allows clients to integrate their devices with the communication platform faster. ...

The topic of this post is simple: How can I specify to an Azure Web Job the schedule using application configuration or another location? Does the web job restart automatically in the moment when I change the time interval? I decided to write about this, because even if you can find the solution on the internet, you need to invest some time on searching until you find the right documentation related to it (INameResolver). Short version A custom INameResolver is defined that based on a key name can read the configuration from any location. In the above example, the value is read from configuration file. Don’t forget to register the name resolver on JobHostConfiguration. namespace WebJob.Schedule { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { JobHostConfiguration config = new JobHostConfiguration(); config.NameResolver = new MagicResolver(); config.UseTimers(); JobHost host = new JobHost(config); host.RunAndBlock(); } priva...