Azure CDN: A Valuable Lesson Learned

On October 21st around 6pm Pacific time, our Azure CDN was gone! It came back a few hours later, but I started digging into a solution that would help mitigate this in the future (this post). Instead of the CDN serving content, it was serving 400’s (Bad Request). When something like this happens, we call it an outage, though that isn’t always the case. There are millions of dependencies in Technology, and if Just one breaks, it can have catastrophic down line damages. So our goal in Cloud and Scalable software is to allow for failure, understand where/when it can happen to the best of our ability, and make backup, fallback routines to handle that failure. These could be automated, or manual, but the more you have in place, the faster your app will come back online when a failure happens. Notice I said when, not if. Plan for failure sooner than later, and you’ll be better prepared.

Technical folks, can skip to Technical Problem and Solution

What could make our CDN just go away? More on that later. How to solve the problem. We put our thinking caps on and …. come up with a solution.

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Windows 8.1 Improved Search Charm

I installed and started running Windows 8.1 a few weeks ago, and I started a new habit. Instead of hitting WINDOWS to launch the full screen start menu, I now just press [WINDOWS]+[S], to bring up the Search Charm. The nice thing about this is … it’s visually less movement, as the search charm will pop-out from the right on top of your desktop apps. I like it!

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Remove Authorized Sites from your Facebook Account

When you log into a web site, using your Facebook account, you give that site access to some (and sometimes a lot) of your personal information, and even your friends information. Maybe it’s just your name, or email, or more, but still, it’s access.

You should try and get into the habit of clearing these out on a regular basis. It just takes a few seconds, and you can quickly revoke access to the left overs. Sites you use regularly should be left intact.

My rule is …. weekly. If I visit a site at least once a week, then I want the authorization to stay. Less than weekly, is easy enough to click that “yes, i agree” button when that site needs access.

Enjoy!

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Revoke Authorized Sites that access your Google Account

When you log into a web site, using your Google account, you give that site access to some of your personal information. Maybe it’s just your name, or email, or more, but still, it’s access.

You should try and get into the habit of clearing these out on a regular basis. It just takes a few seconds, and you can quickly revoke access to the left overs. Sites you use regularly should be left in tact.

My rule is …. weekly. If I visit a site at least once a week, then I want the authorization to stay. Less than weekly, is easy enough to click that “yes, i agree” button when that site needs access.

Enjoy!

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SkyDrive Glue between Word Desktop and Web App

Have you ever used the Web Apps for Office? I am becoming more and more addicted to them. They’re touch friendly (with my new Touch Screen Ultra Book [Lenovo Yoga 13]), fast, and have the glue/sync of SkyDrive built in.

In this quick screen cast, I create a word file on my desktop Word, in a SkyDrive Demos folder, that is already setup to sync to SkyDrive. Then on the website, I can use the Web App version of Word, make some changes to the same document, and see those changes magicaly sync’d back to my desktop drive.

I didn’t show sharing, but it’s just as easy to give access to another person or team to edit the file. The nice part about this is you just keep opening the document on your own machine, and SkyDrive does all the syncing for you between your own SkyDrive and the other users you’ve given editor access to.

Enjoy!

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