Microsoft distributes some really nice looking Azure architecture diagrams / blueprints (like the one on the right) in various materials and even includes them in keynotes, presentations and other places. These really seem like they must be created with Photoshop by a graphic designer. However, this is not the case.

These architecture diagrams are created using Visio! If you have Visio, you too can get your hands on the various assets necessary to create your own awesome architecture diagrams like these!

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!)

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.

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…

Every App Service resource in Azure has the ability to have multiple deployment slots configure. These deployments slots are a feature than can greatly help with the implementation of streamlined testing, staging, and deployment process. Along with the ability to configure multiple hosting environments, the use of Deployment Slots enables zero downtime when deploying application changes, or even rolling back a failed deployment.

Creating Deployment Slots

Deployment slots are a feature of Azure App Service Plans. As a result, every App Service resource (Web App, Web API, Mobile App) in Microsoft Azure has the ability to create up to 4 additional deployment slots with the Standard tiers, and up to 20 deployment slots with the Premium tiers.

Each App Service (in Standard tiers) can have up to 4 additional Deployment Slots in addition to the Production slot.

Each Deployment Slot allows for a separate instance of the application to be…

Serverless computing is a growing trend in cloud computing, and it’s a natural next step in the Platform as a Service (PaaS) area. First PaaS allowed applications to be hosted without requiring Virtual Machines to manage, then serverless computing further removes the construct of a server. Azure Functions is the service within the Microsoft Azure cloud that offers serverless hosting and execution of application code. With serverless architecture removing the construct of a server from the equation of application hosting the concept of pricing begins to get a little fuzzy. This articles explains how Azure Functions pricing works.

Azure Functions is available with the 2 following pricing methods:

Dynamic Hosting Plan

With Dynamic hosting, Azure Functions completely abstracts away the server construct. You no longer pay for reserving CPU Cores and RAM of the underlying Virtual Machine (VM). You only pay for the time your code runs, and not for the time…