Like so many other IT solutions, cloud computing services have long been promoted from a standpoint of administrative efficiency. As the rationale goes, if you get your cloud services from a single provider, you’ll enjoy the reduced hassle of consolidating third party business relationships, receive IT services at bargain prices, and have an easier time coordinating those services. It’s true …
34 Leading PaaS Providers Offering Built-In Infrastructure and Scalability
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) gives users with the platform and the environment for them to develop, manage, and run applications over the Internet. PaaS takes away or lessens the complexities of building, maintaining, and enhancing the cloud infrastructure that developers need in order to develop and launch an app. In other words, PaaS makes higher-level programming easy for web and software developers, and ultimately …
What is Azure Cosmos DB? Features, Benefits, Pricing, and More
Microsoft aims to help you better manage your data with services like Azure Cosmos DB, a multi-model database service that transparently scales and replicates your data wherever your users are. Let’s take a closer look at this PaaS offering and how you can benefit from it. A Definition of Azure Cosmos DB Cosmos DB is a database service that is …
Announcing: Retrace for Azure Functions preview
Have you had a chance yet to play with Azure Functions? Here at Stackify, we’re pretty excited about this capability on Azure and the promise that it holds for building rapidly scale-able event-based processing with little to no management overhead! We’ve also heard from a lot of you asking when Retrace would be able to support this new serverless architecture. …
What is Azure PowerShell? How It Works, Installation, Best Practices, and More
We’ve talked about Azure and some of its helpful features before, such as Azure App Services and the oh-so-useful deployment slots, how to find Azure App service logs for your apps, and other tips. If you’re on the fence about what cloud service is right for you, you might find our recent Azure vs. AWS comparison helpful. However, if you’re …
6 Reasons Cloud Monitoring Is Different Than Server Monitoring
Traditional IT monitoring has revolved around monitoring the infrastructures and servers. As you move to the cloud, it is possible that you don’t have either of those things. You could deploy your app via a service like Azure App Services and rely on Azure’s hosted Redis and SQL offerings. You could literally have access to zero servers. In the cloud, …
What Is Function-as-a-Service? Serverless Architectures Are Here!
It has never been a better time to be a developer! Thanks to cloud computing, deploying our applications is much easier than it used to be. How we deploy our apps continues to evolve thanks to cloud hosting, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and now Function-as-a-Service. What is Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)? FaaS is the concept of serverless computing via serverless architectures. Software developers can …
How to Read & Customize IIS Log Files
Microsoft’s IIS web server uses a non-standard file format that is rarely seen. IIS Log Files use a space-delimited file format and also contain comments in them. The column headings are defined in the comments. In this article, we are going to take a look at how to interpret IIS log files. By the way, if you need help finding your IIS log …
Microsoft Build 2017 Review of Day One – Azure News & Updates
Welcome to Build and our Build 2017 review of day one! The day of course started with the normal cattle herd and a long wait to get into the keynote. Maybe it is just me, but there seems to be more people at Build this year than there was last year. This place is crazy busy! This year Build 2017 …
How to Deploy ASP.NET Core Web App to Azure & How to Use Retrace With ASP.NET Core
ASP.NET Core is the latest version of ASP.NET. It is built from the ground up using .NET Core, the lightweight, composable new .NET Framework. Some people love it, some don’t. However, this is the future. Microsoft will move forward with .NET Core and in the future, the regular, full-fledged versions will go away. I like ASP.NET core a lot. It …
Azure vs. AWS Cloud Service Comparison: Which One is Better?
We’ve used Azure for nearly five years at Stackify; in fact, we built Retrace with Azure in mind. But is Azure the right cloud for you? The battle between Azure and AWS is heated, so we decided to see how they measure up in this head-to-head comparison. (Get a side-by-side, feature-by-feature comparison chart including Google Compute.) Customers love Amazon Web Services …
Compare Services & Features Between Microsoft Azure vs. Amazon Web Services vs. Google Compute
The easiest way to compare the big cloud services players is by evaluating products, services, and features in a direct comparison to determine which cloud best meets your needs. So we’ve done just that, pitting Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud against each other in this head-to-head comparison chart. (For a detailed discussion comparing Azure and AWS, check out this post.) Microsoft …
How to Use Azure DevTest Labs for Test Environments and Dev Machines
DevTest Labs is one the best – and probably least – used features on Azure. It is similar to creating virtual machines on Azure but provides some specific features and advantages we will review. Here are the following topics we are going to cover: What is Azure DevTest Labs? Test Environments Dev Machines in the Cloud What is Azure DevTest Labs? …
How to Autoscale Azure App Services & Cloud Services
One of the major benefits of using the cloud is scalability. With Azure autoscaling, you can scale up and out like you couldn’t do with your own hardware, as much as your wallet allows. But more importantly, you can scale down and in when you don’t need the resources, thereby saving money. This is something you wouldn’t be able to …
Comparison: Azure App Services vs Cloud Services
Microsoft Azure provides multiple ways to deploy your applications to the Azure cloud. Azure App Services and Cloud Services are the two most popular, and easiest, ways to deploy your applications. They both support web applications and background service type applications. In this article, we will provide a comparison of Azure App services versus Cloud Services, along with a quick overview of each. App …
Azure App Services: 3 Limitations & 9 Awesome Features
Azure App Services make it really easy for developers to deploy and manage their applications. They take away all the complexity of dealing with servers, which greatly simplifies the life of a developer. The way that Azure App Services work creates a few limitations that all developers need to understand. This article highlights some of those. 3 Key Azure App Service …
Azure Portal Tips: 9 Tips to Get More Out of Microsoft Azure
The Azure Portal is the go-to place to manage your Azure resources. I spend a lot of time in the portal. I’m sure a lot of you do the same. Here are some tips that will hopefully help you to make the most out of your time in the Azure portal. 1. Change Themes Double-click on any open space on the …
Where to Find Azure App Service Logs for Your App, IIS, Failed Request Tracing, etc
Troubleshooting application problems are difficult. It takes a lot of time. I would argue that it might be the thing that we developers spend most of our time on in the cycle – write some code – F5 – find out why it didn’t work – fix – F5…. And that’s just troubleshooting locally on your own machine. When your …
Why Azure Deployment Slots are Awesome and How to Use Them
Azure App Services are extremely useful for developers. It offers Web Apps, API Apps, Mobile Apps and Function Apps (that run Azure Functions). These apps are incredibly powerful and can literally get you up and running in minutes. They provide a host of amazing features like (auto)scaling, easy authentication, offline sync (for Mobile Apps), hybrid connections and much, much more. …
Making Sense of Your Azure Billing and Azure EA Usage Reporting
I’ve written in the past about how Stackify was “born in Azure” and we’ve never used any other hosting solution. In this post, I want to share how we make sense of our Azure EA (Enterprise Agreement) bill and usage. Azure billing can be quite a mess to figure out. Here are our top tips to analyze your usage and …