The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Fourth time's a charm

I've just completed my fourth Windows Azure deployment this month, and this time, it's a non-trivial site. The Inner Drive Technology corporate website now lives up in the Cloud. Actually, it lives in two places: as an Azure Website for testing, and in Azure Cloud Services for production. All I have to do to complete the task is publish the "production" instance (I've successfully published the "staging" instance) and configure DNS.

This deployment gave me the most trouble, mainly because it has a lot of stuff in it: all my code demos, especially time zones. I also discovered a couple of things about deployments to Azure Cloud Services, in particular that the default staging deployment hits a different port than the production deployment.

It took me about 7 hours to convert the existing Inner Drive code into an ASP.NET Web application and get it working in an Azure website. I had a major hiccup trying to get the time zone data to load, because on an Azure website (but not in Cloud Services), the IANA tzinfo database files live in the file system.

Moving it to Cloud Services only took me about 90 minutes, though. As I've discovered, there are differences between the two, and it's a pain in the ass to alter the project and solution files every time you want to deploy it to a different environment. So, I copied the project and solution files, and voilĂ ! Easy deployment to either environment.

I'll write more about this later. At the moment, I'm waiting for the enormous Inner Drive Extensible Architecture SDK to upload to the Cloud. This could take a while...time to walk the dog.

Update, 21:15 CDT: Inner Drive is live on Azure, including the entire SDK. It took 25 minutes to deploy, which, believe it or not, isn't much more than it usually takes. But the total time to add a Cloud Services role and deploy the site—not counting when I walked away to do something else—was just under two hours.

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