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Breaking up is hard to do

Posted on 3 Mar 2009 at 17:05

Mark Newton discusses how best to part ways with your current ISP and move to a new one, and finds out more about the Azure cloud.

As you can see, there are plenty of places where you could trip up in such a move. It isn't difficult to achieve it in a seamless fashion, but it needs a full understanding of the existing setup, a bit of planning, and the co-operation of all parties involved helps as well. Don't forget any add-on services that might also be affected, such as spam-filtering services that might need their configuration changed. If after reading this you're still not happy about doing it, or don't understand the mechanics of DNS and IP addresses, then don't even attempt this on a domain that's critical to your (or anyone else's) business. Get someone in who does understand it, but check that they understand your current setup before they start changing anything, unlike certain "consultants" I could mention!

Floating on Clouds

On a different tack, Microsoft has just announced development tools for Azure, its version of the Cloud computing idea that everyone is talking about. The idea is that you put your applications and data onto interconnected third-party servers that form a virtual Cloud in which your application is shared between all the servers, and not hosted nor dependent on any single one of them. This makes for a very resilient and immensely scalable hosting setup, in which a collection of server farms around the world hosts your data and balances the load according to the number of user visits. One obvious advantage of this way of working is that you have no need to run your own servers, and another is that upgrading to handle more requests is either completely automatic or simply means adding one extra line of code. Microsoft claims that implementation of an Azure application is simplicity itself with the launch of the Azure SDK and Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2008, so I thought it would be fun to have a play with it.

On reading the installation notes, I saw that the tools have to be installed either on Vista or Windows Server 2008, so I fired up a spare virtual Windows Vista machine and embarked on two days of downloading and installing the necessary patches and applications. First, Vista had to have Service Pack 1 added, but to do this the Vista installation has to be fully patched via Windows Update before it even suggested that I could install the Service Pack. These downloads, installs and reboots caused no real problems except for the length of time spent doing them. Next, .NET Framework 3.5 needed to be installed, after which it needed upgrading to .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. Then I installed Visual Studio 2008 with its own Service Pack 1, followed by Internet Information Server with ASP.NET support enabled. SQL Server Express 2005 or 2008 was the next program to be installed (if you install the 2005 version, you'll need to install SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 or later).

Now, at last, I was ready to install the Azure SDK, and with all the previous items installed this went on surprisingly easily. Finally, I needed to download and install Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2008, but although I'd installed the required Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 it reported that some pre-Service Pack 1 components had been installed, so I had to reinstall Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008! By this point, I was very close to giving up on this roundabout of downloads and installation of various components and their patches. Another 40-minute download later, followed by an hour install and a reboot, and I was ready to try installing Azure Tools for Visual Studio again. At last, success! The reason for installing these tools for Visual Studio is to make it aware of Azure and provide an easy way to create an Azure-aware project.