Microsoft Azure Websites: Full Support for Wildcard DNS and SSL

April 11, 2014 by

Microsoft Azure Websites is Pure Awesome. The speed and amount of work that can be done in a very short period of time is just amazing.

Today, I’m sharing a feature that I’ve been waiting for, for a long time. Wildcard support for DNS and SSL Certificates. In the past, you could use a wildcard certificate, but because Wildcard DNS wasn’t supported, you had to manually enter your sub domains one-by-one. This doesn’t scale very well.

In this screen cast I show you how to setup a *.Wildcard DNS and SSL under an Azure Website. It’s just shy of 5 minutes.

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Installing WordPress on Azure in 3 minutes

October 25, 2013 by

I recently moved ScottCate.com from my old hosting provider to Windows Azure Websites. It was so fast and simple, I wanted to do a srceencast showing just how easy it was. If you’re interested in blogging, or using WordPress for anything, you owe it to yourself to give this a shot.

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Azure CDN: A Valuable Lesson Learned

October 22, 2013 by

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 Azure Website: Deploy from GitHub ScreenCast

January 7, 2013 by

WOW. That is how I describe this screen cast. It’s 7 minutes long, and what can be done in 7 minutes is simply amazing. I know there are other ways to do this, and that Azure isn’t the first continuous deployment solution by any means …. but WOW. I have seen this and heard it talked about before, but today is the first time I’ve actually done it on my own.

In this screen cast, I start from scratch. Zero. Ziltch. Zippo. Nadda. Nothing. And from there we …

  • Create a new Windows Azure Website
  • Create a public GitHub Repo
  • Clone that repo to my local machine
  • Create a blank Visual Studio MVC App, with a generic Home controller and View
  • Head back to Windows Azure, and sync the new Website to the Github Repo
  • Commit the new MVC App, and push to GitHub.
  • Watch and Smile as the AutoSync deploys to Windows Azure Website.
  • For Fun, do another small change, commit, push, watch the auto deploy.

Final site can be seen here: http://scottcate-waws.azurewebsites.net/
Github repo: https://github.com/scottcate/scottcate-waws

Enjoy the Video … This one was REALLY fun to record. Watch it full screen, you’ll enjoy it.

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