Contents tagged with Azure
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Azure Real World: Managing and Monitoring Drupal Sites on Windows Azure
A few weeks ago, I co-authored an article (with my colleague Rama Ramani) about how the Screen Actors Guild Awards website migrated its Drupal deployment from LAMP to Windows Azure: Azure Real World: Migrating a Drupal Site from LAMP to Windows Azure. Since then, Rama and another colleague, Jason Roth, have been working on writing up how the SAG Awards website was managed and monitored in Windows Azure. The article below is the fruit of their work…a very interesting/educational read.
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Azure Real World: Migrating Drupal from LAMP to Windows Azure
Last month, the Interoperability team at Microsoft highlighted work done to move the Screen Actors Guild Awards Drupal website from a Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) environment to the Windows Azure platform: SAG Awards Drupal Website Moves to Windows Azure. The move was the result of collaboration between SAG Awards engineers and engineers from Microsoft’s Interoperability Team and Customer Advisory Team (CAT). The move allowed the SAG Awards website to handle a sustained traffic spike during the SAG Awards show in January. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with some of the engineers who helped with the move. In this post I’ll describe the challenges and steps taken in moving the SAG Awards website from a LAMP environment to the Windows Azure platform.
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Starting a New Blog: Windows Azure’s Silver Lining
If you are a regular reader of my blog, you have probably noticed I haven’t been publishing much lately. That is not to say, however, that I haven’t been writing. I have. I’ve been working with a colleague (Larry Franks) to start a new blog: Windows Azure’s Silver Lining. The focus of that blog will be open source and device development on the Windows Azure platform. I’ve been writing about PHP on the Azure platform for a while now, but I’m excited to take my knowledge to a new level and to branch out into new areas. Part of my excitement stems from the vision laid out by Satya Nadella (President of Microsoft Server and Tools Business Division) for Open Source integration with the Windows Azure platform. In his words (and you can read more here)…
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Interview with Ben Waine, 2011 PHP on Azure Contest Winner
I recently had a chance to catch up via e-mail with Ben Waine, winner of the 2011 PHP on Azure contest winner. The announcement of his victory was actually made at the Dutch PHP Conference in May, but we’ve both been extremely busy since then, so exchanging e-mails has taken a while. I only followed the contest from a distance while it was happening, but after hearing that Ben had won the contest (I had the good fortune of meeting Ben in person at the 2010 Dutch PHP Conference) and after reading his blog series about building his application, I wanted to find out more about his experience. He does a great job of detailing his experience on his blog, so I highly suggest reading his articles if you are looking to understand the benefits and challenges of running PHP application on the Windows Azure platform. If you are interested in learning more about Ben and his hind-sight perspective on his project, read on…
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New Version of Windows Azure SDK for PHP (v 3.0) Available
The Interoperability Team at Microsoft announced today that the production-ready 3.0 version of the Windows Azure SDK is now available. You can read about the details of the release here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/interoperability/archive/2011/05/26/new-sdk-shows-how-to-leverage-the-scalability-of-windows-azure-with-php.aspx, but I wanted to share what I consider the highlights of the release in this post.
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Consuming OData via JSP in Windows Azure
A colleague recently asked me if I knew anything about consuming OData from a Java deployment in Windows Azure. My answer at the time was “no”, but with a quick pointer to http://code.google.com/p/odata4j/ I know the answer would soon change to “yes”. In this short post, I’ll show you how I used this tutorial, Deploying a Java Application to Windows Azure with Command-line Ant, to quickly comsume OData from Java running in Windows Azure.
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Sorting Azure Table Entities by Timestamp with PHP
This is a short post that describes one way to sort Windows Azure Table entities by timestamp when using the Windows Azure SDK for PHP. The problem boils down to sorting an array of objects by a timestamp property, so the information here is nothing that hasn’t been done before. However, after spending some time looking for a way to use a filter in the Windows Azure SDK for PHP API, I didn’t find one, so I’m hoping this post might save others some time. In the end, my solution simply uses the PHP array_multisort function.
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How to Use the Storage Emulator with the Windows Azure SDK for PHP
This is a short post to address this question: How do I use the local Storage Emulator (formerly known as Development Storage) when using the Windows Azure SDK for PHP? The Windows Azure Command Line Tools for PHP provide an option for running an application locally in the Compute Emulator, but I didn’t see an option for using the local Storage Emulator. As it turns out, the answer is very simple, although somewhat difficult to find…
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Updating PHP Settings in Windows Azure
I came across this question on Twitter last week: “How can I turn display_errors on for an application that is running in Windows Azure?” I have to admit that I was stumped. The only thing I could think of was to re-deploy the application with an updated php.ini file. But, I happened to mention this question to Ben Lobaugh who suggested a very simple idea: Store your PHP settings in some durable store external to your application as key-value pairs, then loop through the settings and update them with the ini_set function when a page loads. An example will help make this clear, but first, a couple of caveats:
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Java Access to SQL Azure via the JDBC Driver for SQL Server
I’ve written a couple of posts (here and here) about Java and the JDBC Driver for SQL Server with the promise of eventually writing about how to get a Java application running on the Windows Azure platform. In this post, I’ll deliver on that promise. Specifically, I’ll show you two things: 1) how to connect to a SQL Azure Database from a Java application running locally, and 2) how to connect to a SQL Azure database from an application running in Windows Azure. You should consider these as two ordered steps in moving an application from running locally against SQL Server to running in Windows Azure against SQL Azure. In both steps, connection to SQL Azure relies on the JDBC Driver for SQL Server and SQL Azure.