JLamch

App Service Plan under the hood is a virtual machine with some pre-installed application like IIS. It's a little more complicated than just a VM per App Service Plan, and I as a user cannot access or change this machine. Well this is possible but in a App Service Environment . If you go down in list of App Service available tabs you'll find Console. This is fascinating tool. It is just a console.. but it's on App Service Plan virtual machine.

Let's do a trick. After deploying application (that was easy with Ftp or Git ) it would be nice to take some action. For example send an email, or write release notes to release page. I will do much fancier thing - I will write some text to console output.

Besides FTP there are other ways to deploy application to App Service. You can read more here . It was not so clear for me from the official explanation. I really thought that it's about the local repository based somewhere in my company's basement. But it turns out that this is repository local to Azure. It's fully functional git repository. You can see the history of my commits as example.

Release the Kraken! Finally that I have ready infrastructure and I've shown the internals through Ftp, I can make the release. Release definition you can find here . This is very simple definition because it contains only one task -> copy WAR file to Azure using Ftp.

    Yeah I stumbled a bit writing in  Azure stories. Create App Service  about creating Tomcat 8 application. Well not that this is not correct or functional, it's just that I don't know how to deploy application to this App Service. It's full Tomcat and I know Tom Cat but no Tomcat 8. That's why I will live it to you. Sorry. But hopefully the simple solution I will present in moment will also be helpful in may other cases. I'm creating one more App Service, this time it will be just Web App with some properties  that will allow me to use Tomcat 7.

Creating App Service is quite easy thoue it takes some time. Afterwords I have fully functional web site. Well not exactly it's web site server without any application. Now I need to deploy my applications to Azure. There are few ways to do it, but first it would be nice to set the deployment credentials  with are used by FTP or Git for authentication.

Lately I was talking about difference in PaaS and IaaS . I will probably come back to IaaS in the future, but most of the time I'll concentrate on PaaS solutions. PaaS is much closer to mine mindset, it's more intuitive for developer. I don't want to know (mostly) what's inside PaaS, what's under the hood, I just want it to work. I want to create to very simple pages both displaying only Hello World, based on .Net and Java. First the code and deployment packages. You can find full explanation here , and we can assume that we have 'something' ready to be deployed. Where I can deploy it?

When I started to work with Azure everyone told me that's there are two ways of creating things with Azure one way PaaS another way is IaaS . So what's the difference and what it is in the first place? PaaS is the new way of making things and IaaS is the old way, what do I mean by old ways. Well long, long time ago there where desktops, and some times there were Virtual Machines working on desktops, it was pretty simple because virtual machine was almost the same as normal with the difference that it needed additional software to run and wasn't physically connected to hardware rather with proxy application like Dropbox or VMware or any other. So IaaS is the same but on a could. IaaS is a VM with all needed stuff somewhere in data center available for me via internet. It's Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas). It's not only VM but IP address and other network related stuff I don't know too much about.

There is something very beautiful in fractals. We are looking at the symmetry and feel just right.  But I think there is something even more beautiful. It's alive creature. Something that's growing, something that is loved, taken care of, sometimes die a little bit and other time just blooms. It is a baby of mine, its my project. This is not only my baby is the teamwork, team effort.

Backstory I already told so now some pure devops. The Java Hello World. I found first site that was simple index page with greetings. I forked it and added my own text just to be sure that's the page I'm looking for. You can get the repository here . Creating build definition is very simple because it's almost whole template. The only thing I change is removing restriction on published files types. I want to use .war not .jar in future release definition. Ready definition you can get here , or create it like shown below. Additionally I also created Hello World Asp MVC application and build for it. I will use it as side by side solution to show more options. Repo and build definition .

Configuring build just to check if code is compiling - it's boring and obvious, just create build, choose repository and add build solution task. That's it. This kind of build is useful for checking code integrity eg. after automatic merge. But it's much better to have also unit tests and run them, you can be more or less sure that when tests are green then the merge didn't broke anything vital.

I'm going to create simple build with different test frameworks the repository is already available on my GitHub . So Vsts will contain build definition and GitHub contains the code. I need to make a connection between them.

GitHub is great. I have a GitHub account and I'm planning to share all source code for this blog on GitHub, especially that public repoes are free on GitHub. But I also have a Vsts account, well to be honest a few of them for different purposes, but in the end one is my main directory and others are just for fun, experiments or other strange stuff. Why I don't have all in GitHub? Vsts has no capacity restriction on it's content so I can have everything there, and the most important detail is that Vsts is free and it is private. No one not-invited can see my code collection, and not all code should be public. I also store file like old emails that felt right to be archived somewhere, or some documentation file related to very old projects like my master thesis (this really should not be seen by public anymore :D ). This is my private space for all my code at least since 2012.

There's always a story to tell behind the stage, and this is one of many why I like VSTS ( Visual Studio Team Services ).  Recently I was working with a client trying to find the best cloud architecture for their project.  The small problem was that they we're writing in Java and I am a Microsoft Technology Stack, so the first problem I encountered was how to start because I know 'something' about cloud and azure but I don't know how to proceed with web applications wrote in Java. The easiest way is to Google something... but Googling something isn't enough because you can Google only the source code and you need something up and running ready to show.  The running something is the biggest problem here - how I can build Java, how to test it. So I have some skills in DevOps in VSTS, i love VSTS and i like creating Continuous Integrations on it. 

J stands for Joanna. In Polish there is this rule that female names must end with vowel. I'm a .NET developer with, nicely said, 10+ years of experience. I read a lot about all those diversity problem, programs like 'woman to Polytechnics'. This is now a day a real thing. There is not enough developers and employers are looking for people to fill the gap, I really understand it.

I never had a mentor or even a person that believed in me. Well not never ever because I'm talking about first five years of my commercial job. After those five years I found friends, allies that at least where on my side.

It is not easy to start. To get out of your cozy little closet or basement, especially when you are an introverted developer always feeling phony about yourself.  And it really doesn't matter that everyone tells you that you are good, even special and you know so many things that other don't know. It doesn't really feels like it