We’ll depart Saturday, April 11th at 2pm, with an ETA into Portland at 5:50pm.
Itinerary
1:40pm Arrive at train station in Seattle to join group for boarding. **
2:00pm Departing Seattle King Street Station (i.e. you better be on the train)
2:10pm We’ll be seated and get setup for…
2:15pm We’ll break into teams of ~4 or so people (or however many of us there are we’ll break out to a reasonable size groups).
2:17pm I’ll announce hacking goals and ideas for the teams and we’ll launch into coding. More information will be announced soon, but suffice it to say we’ll be planning a hack around geo and logistics based solutions! The solutions hacking begins!
– – – much hacking and enjoying of the trip occurs here! 🙂 – – –
5:00pm We announce who’s completed what and we’ll demo and discuss the app awesomeness of what we’ve managed to come up with.
5:50pm or before we arrive in Portland and the fringe fun shall begin.
I’ll have more information posted here along with some other ideas about what the hackfest will include, so stay tuned and also be sure to follow @dotnetfringe, and check out all the speakers to start figuring out your plans!
April 12th-14th is the epic .NET Fringe Conference. For those coming from Seattle for the conference, there’s going to be a geek train, there however one major decision that needs to be made. What departure should we board to get to Portland. This is where I’ll need your help to decide. There will be a mini-hack, wifi, food, and likely we’ll actually get the entire car to ourselves with enough of a crew. So sign up, vote, vote often and frequently for your preferred departure time! I’ll see you on the train!
Along with the departure, the trip, events for the trip and more information will be posted on the .NET Fringe site soon, along with additional ideas here.
First let’s build a standard ASP.NET MVC Application (yes, you can do the same without the MVC Project, but I STRONGLY recommend never creating a standard ASP.NET application again, EVER). This quick run through assumes you’ve already setup a Cloud Foundry enabled PaaS w/ your already installed Iron Foundry components for .NET development. Get an Iron Foundry enabled account here, it’s 100% free, so no reason not to give it a go.
There are a few ways to do this. One, the click on the start page new project option.
Click on the start page new project option…
Two, the menu based selection option.
Menu based new project option…
Three, the command button option.
Click on the command button new project option
So pick your poison and then select the ASP.NET MVC 4 Project Template. On the next dialog, you’ll enter the information of where the project will go and choose the ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application Project Template.
Selecting the ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application (Click for full size image)
The next dialog select the Basic template, leave Razor selected, and I always leave the unit tests project there also. Once this is done we’re now ready to give our project a little taste of deployment.
Since we’re working in the land of GUIs and .NET, I’ll keep this to a completely GUI based deployment. However, don’t forget that the vmc-IronFoundry is available for pushing also. So don’t fear the CLI, but we’ll skip it for now (tip: It’s practically the same as the other deploys).
On the project in Visual Studio right click and select Push to Cloud Foundry.
Publish option on the context menu (click for full size image)
A dialog will appear for the basic parameters needed for the deployment. Enter information that you need for your application and click ok.
Setting the parameters (click for full size image)
Now when you navigate to your cloud in the Cloud Explorer UI (Start -> All Programs -> Iron Foundry -> Cloud Explorer) you’ll see the application running under that cloud environment.
As always, it is indeed THAT easy when using a Platform as a Service to deploy to!
A friend and now coworker of mine, Richard Seroter (@rseroter & Blog) decided to do a comparo. I took the infrastructure based deployment, ala IaaS and he took the platform based deployment, ala PaaS. What we’ve done is taken a somewhat standard ASP.NET MVC with Entity Framework, a SQL Server Database, a UX & UI design and got it running locally. From there we then deployed the same application the two respective ways to deploy the web application to a live environment. He took the Tier 3 PaaS (Iron Foundry + Cloud Foundry for the win) and I took the tried and true method of deploying via Windows 2008 Server instances via the Tier 3 Infrastructure.
Here are the steps I went through and for his steps check out this blog article on the PaaS deployment.
Part #1 – Get Some Servers Setup
First things first, I need two instances. If you’re following along, you can basically use whatever instances or server you want. AWS, Rackspace, or Windows Azure. Based on that there may be a few steps here or there you may need to alter, add or subtract from the process. One for the ASP.NET MVC Application and one for the SQL Server Database. The web app server doesn’t need a ton of resources, so I built it and scaled back RAM and cores to a single core.
ASP.NET MVC Web Server (Click for full size image)
In the next step here I’ve selected additional software to be installed on the instance. I’ll need .NET 4.0 so I’ve added this as shown.
Selecting .NET 4.0 for Addition to the Instance (Click for full size image)
After setting up the web server I also setup a database server. For the database server I made sure to allocate some decent resource, setting up 2 cores and 8 GB RAM. I also added the SQL Server installation based on Tier 3’s software packages so it would install automatically when the image is created.
All My Instances Building & Running (Click for full size image)
When I setup the SQL Server instance, I used a blue print feature that allows the SQL Server to be installed directly on the image. This of course saved me a lot of time. But it does add to the deployment time of the instance in the cloud.
Part #2 – Setting up Windows Server 2008
The first thing we’ll need to do is log into these machines and configure them, standard infrastructure stuff. Open up the Server Manager (which launches automatically on instances) and verify that we have IIS installed on the web server.
Database Server
Server Manager (Click for full size image)
Next log into the database server and verify that the SQL Server is up, running and create the initial database.
Thusly…
Using SQL Server Management Studio checking that the SQL Server Exists
Once I had both of the servers up and running I got the application ready to deploy. First a little schema generation to use to deploy the database.
Don’t Use “Script Database as…” option, use the “Tasks” option…
Once the script is generated then transfer it and execute it against the database on the database server.
Execute the SQL Schema Create Script (Click image for full size)
Always a good thing, even if all green lights are seen on the SQL execution, go in and make sure the tables are all there.
Web Server
Publish (Click Full Image)
Publish Application (click for full size image)For the web server, as long as IIS is already installed, the setup is fairly easy. First snag the compiled bits that need deployed. We’ll do a direct drop onto the server and get it running.
To get the compiled bits, right click on the Visual Studio Project and select publish. Add a deployment scenario, which I did and set it up to just spit the bits out to a directory. There of course a multiple options at this point to use FTP, WebDav or whatever your choice is. I’m not a particular fan of any of those in particular, they’re all fairly easy.
Deployment Publication Options (Click for full size image)
Interuption!!!
At this point I actually got hit with the “.NET 4.0 isn’t installed…” which it should have been. I opened up windows update and realized that it had not successfully executed nor had the .NET 4.0 install. This happens with all sorts of instances, regardless of provider, so make sure that the bits we need are installed. Also, with Windows, it’s a really good idea to get windows update turned on.
Back to Deployment
Now that we have the built bits just copy them onto the web application server into the inetpub wwwroot directory. Once you have that copied over you would be able to navigate to the IP of the machine this is setup on. At this time you may also want to setup a cname or a-record to point to the IP, so you can use a friendlier URI.
Retrospective
Now think about what has just gone on for a moment. We had to literally build out machines, add software and more. There were a lot of steps. This takes anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours of actual work. In a larger business or an enterprise environment it could get extended out even further. Because of the extra complexity it could also end up broken, requiring extra troubleshooting and coding. There could even be a host of odd one off configuration issues with the hosting software itself.
Imagine you wanted to host an ASP.NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails and a Node.js App on the Server. That would be almost impossible. Consider how much extra configuration knowledge an ops person would need to troubleshoot each one of those frameworks. Just sit back and contemplate the complexities involved for a moment. All the complexity goes away with something like Cloud Foundry or Open Shift. With someone managing that system for you, such as us here at Tier 3 with our Web Fabric PaaS, AppFog, Cloud Foundry, or one of the other providers even more of the complexities just disappear.
Time for Summary & Beer
With all the steps and individual tasks needed to get something running in an IaaS Environment, go check out how slick getting something up and running with a PaaS style environment. The juxtaposition between what Richard had to go through versus what I had to go through is pretty significant. Simply put, for the vast majority of all application development can be done against a PaaS Environment and likely should. Digging deeper into the infrastruture elements is rarely needed except in rare scaling circumstances, such as the volume that Facebook, LinkedIn or Netflix deal with. Even then, as has been stated by these companies, they have a PaaS of their own they often build software to. So why not have this ability where you build software?
One of my key metrics, and I’ll be elaborating on this metric more in the future, is when I get to head out of the office for the day, relax, have a beer, and think about what I’ll get to create next. I call this my “Beer Enabler Measure“. PaaS technologies make it much easier for me to get to the relaxing part of my day a lot faster than IaaS technologies, and both of these make sure that I’m not pulling an all nighter without a beer like traditional hosting environments often do.
In the end, sure, infrastructure can be important and can help in transitioning legacy applications into an easier to manage environment. Today though, if you’re doing web application dev of any type, it should be deployed against a PaaS Environment either private or public.
Back in December Uhuru Software and Tier 3 released two different forks of Cloud Foundry that enabled .NET Support. I wasn’t sure which I wanted to use, since I had some serious Cloud Foundry work I was about to dive into, so I’ve picked them apart to determine how each works. This is what I’ve found so far.
That covers the basic links to the downloads, community, and other points of presence, now it is time to dig into some of the differences I’ve found. First though, I got a good environment setup to test each of the forks, from within the same Cloud Foundry Environment! So this is how I’ve set this up… Setting up the Virtual Machines w/ VMware Fusion I suspect, you could tangibly do this with some other virtualization software, but VMware is probably the easiest to use and setup on OS-X & Windows. I haven’t tried this on Linux so there’s another space I’d have to give it a go. Using ESX I also suspect this would also be extremely easy to setup. It’s up to you, but I’m doing all of this with VMware Fusion. The environment I’m using for this comparison consists of the following virtual images:
I setup the Uhuru Instances using the instructions available from Uhuru Software here.
Setting up Some Controllers
So the first thing I did was dive into setting up a controller, or actually two, because I wanted to have an Iron Foundry Environment and a Uhuru Software Environment. After that I’d then try to mix and match them and figure out differences or conflicts. The instructions listed under the “Uhuru Instances” has information regarding setup of a controller for the Uhuru Software Environment, which is what I followed. It is also a good idea to get setup with Putty or ready with SSH for usage of Cloud Foundry, Uhuru Software, and Iron Foundry.
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