I’m currently working on moving our product from AWS to Azure and as part of the planning for that move, one of the problems I needed to solve was deployment. Our current deployments are handled by an automated build on Bamboo, but Bamboo doesn’t have a “Deploy to Azure” task. I needed to do the deploy from the command line (CMD or Powershell), and I wanted to avoid including publish profiles in the projects.

The first part, running from the command line was easy to find through with a Google search. You can just tell MSBuild to publish to Azure

msbuild MyWeb\MyWeb.csproj /t:TransformWebConfig;Publish /p:TargetProfile=ProdMyWebApp /p:Configuration=AzDev

But the catch is that you can’t do it without a publish profile as part of your project or at least I wasn’t able to make it work.

I’ve been doing a series of blog posts comparing Azure and AWS services that I’ve used in production. This post is before production usage, but I’ve been researching and experimenting in preparation for proposing moving our databases to Azure and wanted to share my results so far.

Before I could propose this move I needed to understand the cost differences. To do that I needed to know which level of Azure SQL was equivalent to our m1.medium instance at AWS.

tl;dr

An AzureSQL Standard Tier S3 database performs is about 7% faster than a SQL Server SE 2008 R2 database running on an m1.medium instance of AWS RDS. Price comparison are hard because AWS RDS has a sea of options to choose from, but if you meet the requirements for SQL Server Web licensing then pricing is similar.

Part of my ongoing series comparing AWS and Azure for the services where I’ve used both in production. In this post I’ll be looking at the differences between Azure Blob Storage and Amazon S3 for storing and retrieving files.

tl;dr

• Azure’s logical structure allows you to manage multiple containers at the same time.
• AWS allows default documents and with that you can host a static site for pennies per month in S3.
• Azure Blob can integrate Azure Search to allow searching the content of some documents

I added Azure Search to my static site built with Jekyll through the use of Azure Functions. Best part, it’s free*.

This example is for Jekyll, it will work with any static site. The only thing Jekyll specific is the JSON representation of the site, and any static site generator should be able to build that file. I’ve used (Pretzel and PieCrust as well, they are both nice tools, but hosting on GitHub pages has it’s advantages).

Once I had my Azure Search Indexer Failure Notifier working as an Azure Function I needed to make it run on all of our Indexers. I had 3 choices for sharing common code:

1. Copy/Paste
2. Have one big function that checked every indexer
3. Find some way to share code between functions