.NET on The Lonesome Crowded Web

Revisiting a Site Built On Azure Functions

Wed, 03 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Last year I blogged about Building a Small Site on Azure Functions. It was an interesting experiment, though not a serious solution I’d recommend to anyone based on that experience. Still, the site has been running away in the background serving the very occasional visitor since then at the cost of just a few cents per month.

At some point in the last month or two (some form of monitoring would have helped here) the site stopped working. Based on a quick search I think this might be due to do some breaking changes in Azure Function Proxies (a preview technology) and its handling of catch-all routes, but I’m not entirely sure.

Named Dbup Code Scripts

Thu, 14 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a big fan of the DbUp library and its approach to database management. Rather than go over all the benefits of this approach, I’ll leave it to the docs which do a much better job than I could. Suffice it to say, all the things it brings to the table - tight control, predictability, ORM independence, the power of raw SQL - are all good things!

Historically I have been able to do most things with this raw SQL approach. I’ve created these scripts with a fairly typical (I think) naming convention like so:

isitinthe.cloud - Building a Small Site on Azure Functions

Sun, 16 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I recently stumbled upon Is it on AWS? and its accompanying backstory. It sounded like a fascinating way to create a small, focused website. I thought it would be a positive learning experience to create a similar site with Microsoft Azure.

Introducing IsItInThe.Cloud

This blog will detail the steps taken to create the site; but first, a few notes:

Credit to Is it on AWS? for the initial inspiration.
The site is a relatively quick-and-dirty implementation and nowhere near as robust as its source of inspiration.
The check is done by a simple IP Address comparison between a site’s DNS lookup and Microsoft’s list of Azure Datacenter IP Ranges . But there are many reasons they may not match, so it should not be considered highly accurate.
IPv6 is not currently supported - I wasn’t able to locate any published IPv6 ranges for Azure. Please point me in their direction if you happen to know where to find them!
I don’t have a lot of experience with Azure, so I welcome any feedback on any improvements, platform features I haven’t used appropriately, etc.
This is probably not a sensible way to host a website - at least not yet anyway - but you be the judge.
The source code is available.

If you’re unfamiliar (as I am!) with the idea of Serverless Computing, I’d encourage you to start by reading this article by Mike Roberts or the Azure Functions documentation.