Month: November 2016

Uncategorized

Static Website Hosting in Azure Storage

on November 30, 2016

Build5Nines

Traditional shared hosting providers generally cost anywhere between $8 – $10 USD per month. The reason is you need to reserve some CPU and Memory resources on a VM to host your website. These are very useful for hosting dynamic web sites or applications with small amounts of traffic. However, if you have a static website then you don’t need CPU and Memory on a VM, all you need is storage and bandwidth. Since hosting a static website or static front-end to an API powered web application only requires storage and bandwidth, it makes Azure Storage a perfect service to host such a website. In this article I’ll explain what’s necessary to host static website in Azure Blob Storage, then I’ll show how you can estimate the hosting cost of the site as well. (Hint: It’s really cheap!)

View original post 651 more words

Uncategorized

Azure Storage Explorer now supports Linux and more

on November 25, 2016

Build5Nines

When the Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer was first released, it did seem a little odd that Microsoft would neglect supporting Linux. However, they did support both Windows and Mac OSX initially. In good news, there have been a number of updates to the Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer announced with a short roadmap of what’s to come in the future.

View original post 80 more words

Uncategorized

Single Instance VMs Now With 99.9% SLA

on November 24, 2016

Build5Nines

Since the initial release of the Virtual Machine (VM) hosting service within Microsoft Azure there’s been a limitation on achieving the minimum requirements for the 99.9% SLA guarantee. This limitation has been that you needed to provision at least 2 VMs to get the SLA guarantee. That is until now. Now, there is an option to provision a single instance VM and have the 99.9% SLA guarantee too!

Microsoft is constantly working to improve and add new features / services to the Microsoft Azure platform. Among the latest of these changes is to support a 99.9% SLA with SINGLE instance VMs. While this isn’t a replacement for multi-instance VM configurations, this offers enhanced reliability for workloads where a single VM instance works.

Single Instance VM SLA Requirement

There are a few requirements that need to be met in order to achieve the 99.9% SLA guarantee for a single instance VM…

View original post 230 more words

AzureDevelopment

Azure Bot Service (Preview)

on November 20, 2016

dev_botframework

Last week at Microsoft’s Developer Connect(); // 2016 event, a new public cloud bot service powered by Microsoft Bot Framework is now available on Azure called the Azure Bot Service.

The Azure Bot Service will allow you to:

  • Use the Bot Framework with Azure serverless platform to run and scale your bots while only paying for your usage
  • Get started quickly with out of the box templates for .NET and Node.js. These templates allow you to create a basic bot, a language understanding bot (LUIS), a form bot or a proactive bot:

image

  • Write code for your bot directly in the browser within Azure. You will also be able to test your bot with the included Web Chat control:

image

  • Configure conversation channels
  • Take advantage of integrated continuous deployment (DevOps)

Now more than ever it’s so easy to get started with creating your bots and having them run on Azure.

Enjoy!

References

Azure Bot Service

LUIS: Language Understanding Intelligent Service

Uncategorized

Deploy Docker Containers to Azure Web Apps on Linux

on November 20, 2016

Build5Nines

The PaaS (Platform as a Service) offerings within Microsoft Azure have been getting expanded out pretty impressively lately. The “extreme PaaS” that is the serverless computing of Azure Functions is a really interesting direction for cloud computing. However, one of the of the latest changes is the ability to host Docker Containers on Linux within Azure App Service Web Apps! It seems Microsoft is starting to add Docker support to everything.

App Service Web Apps on Linux

A few weeks ago the initial preview release of Azure App Service Web Apps for Linux was released. This offers a way to host OSS applications (Node.js, Python, PHP, etc) in Azure App Service with the use of a Linux Virtual Machine (VM). This provides a great alternative to hosting all Azure Web Apps with a Windows Server VM and IIS. While IIS works, the option of using Linux is definitely more…

View original post 744 more words