Random Thoughts

My last exercise on deploying Nerddinner on IronFoundry helped me a lot to understand the platforms capabilities. Time to do the same thing on AppHarbor , another PaaS player in .Net space. AppHarbor tries to emulate Heroku in .Net space. They are the ' Azure done right ' brigade. As a developer I just needs to push code either to AppHarbor or some of the supported repositories such as CodePlex, GitHub, BitBucket and AppHarbor does the rest. AppHarbor Builds the code. Runs unit tests Deploys the application on AppHarbor’s application servers (backed by Amazon EC2 ). Other than that it also provides all the standard benefits as provided by most PaaS players. To gain first hand experience on AppHarbor I decided to port Nerddinner onto AppHarbor. I already had the Nerddinner codebase in github so i could start right away. Creating Account   The first step was to register my account with AppHarbor. Once registration is complete we get a single instance under the...

One of the new entrants in the .Net PaaS space is IronFoundry . Tier 3 an enterprise cloud platform for mid-tier, large enterprise and SaaS have come up with Iron Foundry(IF) a port of Cloud Foundry (CF) that is targeted towards Microsoft .Net platform. IF is an implementation of CF that is tightly integrated with the .NET Framework. It can support multiple frameworks, cloud providers, and application services all on a cloud scale platform. The platform is currently thin on documentation so what better way to learn about it than to port some application to run on IF Nerddinner - The application of choice Nerddinner was a good fit for this exercise. It is a tiered application with an ASP.Net MVC based front end and MS SQL Server based data access, both supported by Iron Foundry out of box. The Process The process started with setting up an Iron Foundry account that would be used to deploy the application. Since the service is in beta there is no cost incurred during setting up...