by Arlan Nugara | Jun 28, 2017 | Azure
Transitioning from On-Prem VMs to the Cloud via ‘Lift-and-Shift’
On February 14th, 2017, the last of my company’s physical servers were powered-off and then scheduled to be unracked and boxed for shipping out of the co-location hosting data centre. The physical servers that my company had invested in and setup to power our development, testing, support and client application requirements were no longer needed to run our virtual machines (VMs). We decided to move all of our VM infrastructure to Azure since it was the leading digital-transformation enabler in Canada that could meet all of our technical needs as well as those of our clients.
A VM is a software computer that, like a physical computer, runs an operating system and applications. The VM is comprised of a set of specification and configuration files and is backed by the physical resources of a host computer. Every VM has virtual devices that provide the same functionality as physical hardware and have additional benefits in terms of portability, manageability, and security.
The VM lift-and-shift approach is a common cloud migration path where companies replicate in-house VMs in the cloud with little or no re-design. For a company with a limited number of VMs in a simple configuration, it is generally a fast and relatively straight-forward migration to the cloud. The issues arise when there are complex interactions between multiple VMs and the hosted applications that may require a lot of careful planning and testing of the migration to the cloud. Microsoft has provided migration and planning tools such as the Migration Assessment Tools and Azure Site Recovery (ASR) Deployment Planner.
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by Arlan Nugara | Jun 23, 2017 | Azure, WordPress
Read all of the other posts in our series on Creating Azure (hosted) WordPress Websites without knowing php or MySql!
Now, we look at the second Azure Blob Storage option discussed – uploading and accessing images stored in Azure Storage using the Windows Azure Storage for WordPress plugin.
1. Using a Windows Azure account and an Azure subscription, create a Windows Azure Storage account and a Blob container with its Access Policy set to ‘Blob’, which is a public, read-only container. Read how to do that here, steps 1 and 2.
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by Arlan Nugara | Jun 23, 2017 | Azure, WordPress
Read all of the other posts in our series on Creating Azure (hosted) WordPress Websites without knowing php or MySql!
This is a 3 Part excerpt from our soon-to-be-released book, “Build Secure WordPress Websites in Azure – without knowing PHP or MySql“.
Part 1: Using Azure Blob Storage to Store and Deliver WordPress Media and Uploads
Part 3: Using ‘Windows Azure Storage for WordPress’ Plugin for Hosting Media and Uploads
1. With an Microsoft account and an Azure subscription, in the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) portal, set up a Storage Account:
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by Arlan Nugara | Jun 21, 2017 | Azure
One area of Azure that I like to highlight in my conversations with companies as an over-looked digital-transformation enabler is DevTest Labs. Microsoft released Azure DevTest Labs on May 2016 but customers have since found many creative uses for it beyond software development and testing environments. There is no additional cost for the services of DevTest Labs since you are only charged for standard Azure resource consumption such as VMs and storage used in your lab.
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by Arlan Nugara | Jun 12, 2017 | Conferences
Beer City Code is an annual conference for software developers held in Grand Rapids, MI, also known as Beer City, USA. Software creators of all types are welcome, even those who don’t care for beer. The Beer City Code conference grew out of the success of its predecessor, Grand Rapids DevDay, but was renamed in 2017 to embrace its much more broad appeal outside the Grand Rapids area.
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by Arlan Nugara | Jun 9, 2017 | Azure, WordPress
Another post in our series on Creating Azure (hosted) WordPress Websites without knowing php or MySql!
Why Use a Child Theme?
Child Themes are used when you know that you will be customizing and changing the website’s theme. The Child Theme is totally dependent on its parent to be able to work. A Child Theme isn’t a viable entity in itself – it uses everything in the parent theme and then you only modify what functions you want to be different. The Parent Themes files are not changed. In WordPress, when a Theme is updated, which they regularly are, all current customizations are over-written and lost. Using a child theme allows modifications and additions to the functionality of the parent theme, without modifying the parent theme’s code files directly. Updating the parent theme is easy and doesn’t erase any customizations. Plus, you can always revert back to the parent theme if you inadvertently break the child theme.
Note that using the Divi theme, a child theme is not required since there is a Custom CSS option built into the theme that will not be overwritten during theme updates.
How to Build a Child Theme:
From the Codex of WordPress.Org:
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by Arlan Nugara | Jun 9, 2017 | Azure, WordPress
Read all of the other posts in our series on Creating Azure (hosted) WordPress Websites without knowing php or MySql!
This is the first of a 3 Part excerpt from our soon-to-be-released book, “Build Secure WordPress Websites in Azure – without knowing PHP or MySql“.
Part 2: Setup Azure Blob Storage to work with WordPress
Part 3: Using ‘Windows Azure Storage for WordPress’ Plugin for Hosting Media and Uploads
Problem: Uploaded media and uploads to the WordPress Media Library are unorganized, difficult to find to re-use or edit & overload website storage
Blogs need images and videos.
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by Arlan Nugara | Jun 6, 2017 | Community, Windsor Essex .NET Developers
June 6, 2017 – 10 went
While some cloud users are evaluating AWS vs. Azure, many enterprises are planning to use both cloud providers to avoid vendor lock-in and latency while creating redundancy. While Azure is now the clear #2 in public cloud behind AWS there are some notable differences between how the two hyper-clouds operate and the best practices for deploying workloads in each to create a multi-cloud solution that can optimize for cost and performance. The session covered:
1) AWS vs. Azure differences for compute, networking, storage and pricing.
2) Recent and coming enhancements for AWS Lambda and Azure Functions.
3) Multi-cloud environments can be complex so let’s discuss the best practices for cloud deployments when using both AWS and Azure.
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by Arlan Nugara | Jun 5, 2017 | Azure, WordPress
Another post in our series on Creating Azure (hosted) WordPress Websites without knowing php or MySql!
Configuration Overview
This is the sequence of customizations we will use to configure a WordPress website hosted on Microsoft Azure, regardless of the website’s final purpose:
- Choose and upload a WordPress Theme which is the website’s front-end design package
- Create and install a Child Theme of the chosen Theme
- Setup the website’s backup/restore process on Azure so you can always go back a step if you’ve broken something causing the website to not load or lock you out. It’s important to test and ensure the Restore process is successful BEFORE its necessary.
- Setup Email sending via SMTP
- Setup the website’s Security
- Customizations of some of the WordPress default features
- Installing and configuring ‘general’ and then specific plugins for website’s end use
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by Arlan Nugara | Jun 4, 2017 | Azure, WordPress
Another post in our series on Creating Azure (hosted) WordPress Websites without knowing php or MySql!
To force the new WordPress website to resolve only to HTTPS, it is necessary to access the web.config file of the website, and add in an URL Rewrite Rule.
How do we quickly access the web.config file in an Azure hosted WordPress site?
Every Azure App Service (website) has an associated ‘scm’ service website or a Site Extension named Kudu created for your website . It is accessed by using the Source Control Management entry point https://<site-name>.scm.azurewebsites.net. NOTE: The custom domain name will not resolve with the scm modification to its URL – you must use the original *.azurewebsites.net DNS name to access Kudu. In our case, the https://tech-blog.scm.alvarnet.com will NOT work…we must use https://tech-blog.azurewebsites.net to access Kudu.
Kudu can also be accessed via the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) for your Azure website under Settings > Development Tools > Advanced Tools > Go > Read more about Kudu here.
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