Solving Real-World Problems with Windows Azure Web Sites

One of my peers, Brady Gaster, has released a blog post series on solving real-world problems with Windows Azure Web Sites. Windows Azure Web Sites, as I’m sure by now you already know, is our hosting platform for web applications in Windows Azure. With three levels of service, WAWS offers a number of ways to quickly and easily deploy web sites to the Azure cloud. You can start small and scale as your application needs change and traffic increases.

You can see a list of the posts on Brady’s web site at the following URL, but I’ve copied down some abstracts for each post to make it easy for you (and me) to find them later.

http://www.bradygaster.com/solving-real-world-problems-with-windows-azure-web-sites

And here’s that list of articles:

Multiple Environments with Windows Azure Web Sites
In this post I demonstrate how to have production and staging sites set up for your web site so that you can test your changes in a sandbox site before pushing your production site and potentially causing damage to it (and your reputation). If you’ve wondered how to gate your deployments using Windows Azure Web Sites, this is a good place to start. You’ll learn how to use Windows Azure Web Sites with a GitHub.com repository and some creative branching strategies to maintain multiple environments for a site.

Managing Multiple Windows Azure Web Site Environments using Visual Studio Publishing Profiles
This post takes the same sort of scenario as presented in the first article. Rather than use GitHub.com as a means to executing a series of gated environment deployments it focuses on the awesome features within Visual Studio for web publishing. Specifically, you’ll see how to use publishing profiles to deploy to multiple Windows Azure Web Sites, so that a team of peers responsible for releasing a site can do so without ever needing to leave Visual Studio.

This post also takes a look at the idea of release management and how this solution answers the question of doing proper release management with a cloud-hosted web site. If you’ve wondered how your SDLC could fit in the idea of continuously maintaining a series of environments for gating your releases using Visual Studio’s super-simple publishing features, this is a great place to start.

Connecting Windows Azure Web Sites to On-Premises Databases Using Windows Azure Storage Bus
This post introduces the idea creating a hybrid cloud setup using a Windows Azure Web Site and the Windows Azure Service Bus, to demonstrate how a web site hosted in Windows Azure can connect to your on-premises enterprise database. If you’ve been wondering how to save data from your Windows Azure Web Site into your local database but didn’t know how to do it, or if you’re thinking of taking baby steps in your move toward cloud computing, this post could provide some good guidance on how to get started.