I noticed a contest this week while working on the Database Weekly newsletter. It’s the Cloud Hero contest, with the chance to win a Surface Pro 3. I could always use another device, or at least a device I could give away, so I decided to enter.

There are a few things you can do, all of which are interesting to me in terms of a direction that I, and Red Gate, want to move. I don’t know if Azure works everywhere, but we are considering moving SQLServerCentral, or perhaps parts of it, to Azure, so this was a good chance for me to try out some new Azure stuff.

I’ve messed with a few things in Azure, but mostly on the PaaS side. That interests me more, and I’ve done little with IaaS. I certainly haven’t really worked with IIS much in Azure. I decided to go through the VM setup, to create two IIS machines, load balanced on the same URL. I used this blog post with a cartoon and demo to run through the process.

It was a bit more than 10 minutes, mostly because some of the allocation stuff in Azure took time, and the responsiveness from the VM in Azure was slow. From the time I connected to the time Server Manager popped up was over two minutes for each machine. Since I was going through some of the steps sequentially, that meant it was slow to get going.

The video and the portal bring to light some of the issues of Azure. It’s a great tutorial and I was able to get the two machines load balancing IIS in 20 minutes (or less). It was surprised how quickly it went, but I also had to stop and think. The load balancing and cloud services are different now than they were when the post was written.

I’m sure that’s the case with lots of Azure content. In some sense, this means that we will have lots of issues with people trying to learn how to use Azure as they’ll find content and information that is woefully out of date, sometimes quickly. I wonder if we need to think about having some code on blogs for Azure that marks the content as potentially out of date after it’s been out for 6 months.

It’s a challenge to keep the content up to date, and luckily the changes weren’t too different in the portal.

I am glad that I was able to get to IIS machines up and load balanced, delete them, and bring them back. That makes me think I may find some use for this Azure stuff, yet. I have a few projects in mind, including rebooting my personal site. Perhaps Azure will be the place I give it a go.

Filed under: Blog Tagged: Azure, Cloud Computing, syndicated, windows