Random Thoughts

I have been exploring Iron Foundry a PaaS player in .Net space for the last few weeks. One of the things I liked about Iron Foundry was, how fast deployments happened. One of the reasons for this is how binary\file package gets uploaded to the cloud infrastructure. The Iron Foundry \ Cloud Foundry approach (since Iron Foundry is port of CF) of only uploading change-set instead of complete binary\file package makes this step of deployment quite fast. What happens in Azure is You create a package file (cspkg) using either Visual Studio (VS) or command line tool cspack The generated package file contains the complete set of binaries and other resources such as images, css, javasripts etc  This package is then uploaded to Azure infrastructure and then deployed by the Fabric Controller. In contrast the process that Cloud Foundry follows to decide what it should send to cloud follows a multi-stage process. When an application is ready to be pushed to Cloud Foundry the client a...

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...