Neil Kidd's Blog

On a recent POC we found a bit of a problem with the time it was talking to deploy our application to Azure’s staging environment then deploy it into production. Now I must point out that we had a token that allowed us to have quite a lot of machine instances Read More...

One thing that you need to consider when designing your Azure application is " what is the minimum deployment "? If your application has 5 different queues with a worker role to read each queue, we are going to want at least 2 instances per Read More...

After the last 2 blog entries, we have our worker process's main loop feed back into Azure's heath checking system. If we go unhealthy, Azure will notice and will eventually restart the worker role. However, this is a bit heavy handed; what if the failure Read More...

Last week, for a Azure POC, we implemented something similar to the pattern shown in Part 1 . One revision, that I asked to be made, was to surround the DateTime access code with a lock statement; I was worried that updating a DateTime struct would not Read More...

Building a decoupled, queue based system is will give you the ability to scale and the opportunity to create a highly available application. By dispatching work to multiple back end worker roles we are building a system that can survive unfortunate events Read More...

If you are developing a queue based system in Windows Azure - and lets face it, if you want a highly scalable and reliable application, you going to be using queue - you are going to have to deal with poison messages. A poison message is a message that Read More...