Posts

Background Jobs in Heroku with Azure Service Bus

Jan 14, 2021 · 11 min read

Web applications are optimized for throughput and latency to service a high number of HTTP requests as quickly as possible. For improved performance, web applications defer the CPU intensive, IO intensive, time-intensive, and scheduled processing workloads to background jobs that run independently of the user interface. These background jobs must function without intervention from the user interface and should not block a synchronous user and system interaction. Offloading slow and compute or memory-intensive activity to background jobs improves web applications' performance and throughput.

#azure #integration #heroku

Implementing Multi Session Sequential Convoy Pattern with Azure Service Bus and Go

Jan 02, 2021 · 10 min read

In many event-driven applications, preserving the sequence of events is essential. For example, an event-driven eCommerce application might have the following states, transitions, and events. A user adds N items to the basket. This action generates the item added event. The user checks out the basket. This action generates the basket checked out event. The user pays for the items. This action generates the payment made event. Inventory decrements the count of available items by N.

#azure #integration #programming

Simplifying ARM Template Deployments with Ansible

Dec 10, 2020 · 6 min read

I discussed how you could use Ansible with Terraform to simplify configuration management in my previous post. If, instead of Terraform, you prefer using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to define the infrastructure and configuration for your project, you can use Ansible for managing parameters that customize each environment by dynamically generating a Resource Manager parameters file. A great thing about using Ansible for your ARM configuration needs is that it includes a suite of modules for interacting with Azure Resource Manager.

#azure #devops

Simplifying Terraform Deployments with Ansible - Part 2

Nov 13, 2020 · 10 min read

In this series Motivation & Ansible 101 Terraform & Ansible I am happy to see that many people are enthusiastic about this series and wish to make their IaC applications better with Ansible. What I intend to do is very simple. I will write an Ansible playbook that uses the template module (see Templating with Jinja2) and a little magic of Jinja2 templates to load appropriate variables and configurations for each Terraform environment.

#devops

Simplifying Terraform Deployments with Ansible - Part 1

Nov 03, 2020 · 5 min read

In this series Motivation & Ansible 101 Terraform & Ansible Enterprise developers are responsible for deploying infrastructure to multiple environments, such as development, staging, and production. One core problem with configurations in Terraform is that with the number of environments and variables, the number of “.tfvars” files used to manage configurations will increase. Several tools, such as Puppet, Chef, and Ansible, help simplify the management of configurations.

#devops

Monitoring Health of ASP.NET Core Background Services with TCP Probes on Kubernetes

Oct 24, 2020 · 9 min read

Many microservices applications require background tasks and scheduled jobs to process requests asynchronously. In the .NET Core ecosystem, background services are called Hosted services because a single host, such as a web host or a console host, can run several such services in the background while it is alive. In terms of implementation, a hosted service is required to implement the IHostedService interface. You can implement the IHostedService interface yourself, or even better, leverage the BackgroundService class that implements some common concerns such as cancellation token management and error propagation to the host for you.

#programming #kubernetes

Integration Tests for gRPC Services in ASP.NET Core

Oct 01, 2020 · 6 min read

The default implementation of the gRPC on .NET - Grpc.net is built on Grpc.Core which uses the protoc tool (see: ProtoCompilerOutput) to generate C# artifacts from .proto files. Also, it adds complexity to testing the services and sharing the contracts with clients. The proto files are artifacts/files shared between the clients and the server that need to be managed and kept synced between the two parties. It is important to note that protobuf is simply a serialization format, and it is not dependent on proto files.

#programming

Dynamic Admission Control in AKS with Azure Functions

Sep 20, 2020 · 15 min read

This article is part of #ServerlessSeptember. You’ll find other helpful articles, detailed tutorials, and videos in this all-things-Serverless content collection. New articles from community members and cloud advocates are published every week from Monday to Thursday through September. Find out more about how Microsoft Azure enables your Serverless functions at https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/azure-functions/. Nov 02,2020: The implementation of validating webhook Azure Function that uses Azure Communication Service is available in the feature/impl-azure-comm-service branch.

#azure #kubernetes #compute

Cheapskate’s Journey to On-Demand Load Tests on Heroku with Locust

Jun 20, 2020 · 17 min read

I want to stretch every dollar that I spend on the cloud. I run a handful of web applications on Heroku, and like everyone else, run a suite of smoke tests and load tests on every release increment in a non-production environment. Load tests are important: they help us not only to understand the limits of our systems but also bring up issues that arise due to concurrency, which often escape the realms of unit tests and integration tests.

#azure #heroku #devops #programming

Using Startup Command to Pass Command Line Arguments to Azure App Service for Linux

Jun 06, 2020 · 6 min read

Azure App Service on Linux has several pre-fabricated Docker images that support applications written in languages such as .NET core, PHP, and Node.js. App Service also supports using your own Docker image to spin up a container for your application. A useful configuration feature of App Service on Linux is the Startup File configuration that you can set as part of configuring the runtime stack. The value that you specify for the configuration overrides the CMD instruction of the Dockerfile that creates the runtime of the application.

#azure #app-service