JLamch

Some experiments take some time. Others take much longer. Although they are not so complicated. Data-intensive operations take a long time. My experiment was to visualize my working machine. It's very good machine (gaming 14" MSI that I adore) but still it can be better :) In azure in the MSDN subscription I have money to spent so I can create quite heavy loaded machine with not so big price - of course if I don't use it all the time. And working machine should be (at least in theory) working only 8 h / 20 days a month.

I had a plan to create few posts about Azure related with Java and my work at one clients application. Here is the full Azure and Java story . I've created quite a lot of App Services in a process (it never work the first time I try to record it) and now all those resources are eating my virtual MSDN money! I could delete all of them. But if I wanted to come back some day and continue this story? I decided that I need to archive this structure.

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.

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 .

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.