This post is to provide customer who are considering / has decided Windows Azure for Dev / Test environment. Windows Azure’s Values for Different Stakeholders in Dev / Test Scenario     Application sponsor BUIT/ Developers Central IT/ Infrastructure Ops Faster time to market Faster infrastructure provisioning and rollout times on Windows Azure enable your application teams to make changes faster Instantly provision any amount of test/development resources, when you need them Allow your users to self-provision based on a set of policies and rules that you set upfron ..read more

Recently, I found an analysis paper about cloud server performance conducted by an independent cloud performance metrics company, Cloud Spectator. This post is to summarize the paper and I definitely encourage you to read the full report over here: http://www.iqcloud.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Cloud-Computing-Performance-A-Comparative-Analysis-of-5-Large-Cloud-IaaS….pdf Objective of analysis study The objective of the paper is determine the price-performance value of the cloud providers. Providing some valuable insight for customer when selecting their prefer cloud vendor. Figure 1 – Prin ..read more

SQL Database and its three replicas You might have heard that SQL Database (formally SQL Azure) is a scalable and highly durable database service on the cloud and there’re multiple replicas automatically provisioned when we create a database. It’s true that there will be three replicas store for each database. This is in fact purely for HA purpose in case one of the machine hosting the SQL Database service goes down. Customers are transparent and inaccessible to these three replicas. In another word, if we accidentally delete one of the table (or entire database), it’s really gone ! (Luckily i ..read more

Community Technology Update (CTU) 2013 will be held on 27th July 2013, organised by the Community Leads from various Singapore based User Groups and MVPs. We’re putting together some of the best talents from the island (and our closest neighbour, Malaysia), in order to share our experiences across the series of Microsoft Technologies that we believe all of us truly care about. Register now! How do I sign up? Follow the instructions in the URL to register – http://www.sgdotnet.org/Pages/Registration.aspx How much does it cost? For early bird registration, it’ll cost you ..read more

The Requirement Recently, one of my partners has the requirement: Three micro-services are deployed as App Service (Web App for Containers) within one App Service Plan. They’d like to control the traffic, in which App X can access App Y, but any other app else (including App Z or other external parties) can’t access App Y. Refer to the following diagram: Figure 1. Access Requirement They’d like to achieve this without App Service Environment. The solution This requirement can be achieved in 3 primary steps as can be seen in this diagram: Figure 2. The solution Step 1. Virtual Network a ..read more

Background Every application has its own criticality level, some are mission critical in nature, while other aren’t. Mission critical apps typically requires very high uptime or availability. Many Azure PaaS services such as App Service and SQL Database have built-in HA (high availability) features to tolerate failure within the region with minimum or even zero configuration requires. However, most of the HA features are in-region, meaning the redundancy takes place within the same region or datacenter. In the unfortunate events such or large-scale disasters such as earthquake, flooding, etc ..read more

Recently i passed CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer) Exam. I must admit, this is the most challenging IT exam that I’ve ever taken. The main reason was the exam is 100% hands-on. No multiple answer nor True / False. But i also feel this was the most fulfilling exam. Here’s my cert There are two variants of Kubernetes Certification, namely CKAD and CKA. In nutshell CKAD is designed for software developers who’d like to develop and deploy their apps in Kubernetes. While CKA is designed for the IT administrators who are managing the Kubernetes clusters. In general, CKA covers ..read more

Updated (17 August 2020)! Things change fast the cloud! I mentioned in the original post that redeployment was required to move to Premium v2. Now, glad to see that the App Service Engineering team has simplified the experience so that you now can move to Premium v2 just like other Tiers without redeployment. However, there’s a catch to that: “The IP addresses (both inbound and outbound) will change, as can be seen in the diagram below. IP addresses will change when upgrade to Premium v2 As such, you may need to make necessary arrangement such as update the ip address whitelist should there ..read more

You might have seen many examples of Azure Media Services (AMS) Live Streaming demo through Wirecast installed on the laptop as shown in below links: Jason’s post on Azure Blog Jason’s recorded session in Ignite 2015 Now, I’d like to share a different way to live stream, by using your smartphone’s camera. Interesting, isn’t it? Mingfei has a post leveraging Wirecast’s iOS app here. The idea is that approach is to leveraging a camera on your phone while still requires Wirecast at the desktop. In this post, I’ll be showing a different of my approach, by having a lightweight encoder installed o ..read more

I’m very excited about the release of this features in Azure Media Services. In fact, in the past few months there have been several asks from my customers which I personally engaged with. Jason and Cenk from Media Services team have explained how the feature works in technically details. In this post, I’ll explain it differently, specifically from scenario-driven perspective, follow by the “how-to” with the UI-based Azure Media Services Explorer and also through .NET SDK. Customer Requirement: Bitrates filtering for different clients (browser-based and native mobile-based) Imagine that, as an ..read more