I have few WCF services, deployed at IIS, which are consumed by some android devices. I'm have to move all my databases and services to Azure. I googled to find out how to deploy WCF at Azure, and found a concept of WebRole and Azure Cloud Service project. See THIS SO POST
But at the same time, I just tried creating a new webapp in Azure and simply published my WCF services project there, and it worked fine. (I tested with client).
My Question is,
What is the difference between the methods mentioned in the post I linked, and the way I deployed? I'm concerned, because I'm expecting high amount of requests.
Is it okay to deploy my already created/ready services the way I did?
What is preferred?
Both (WebApp and Web role) will work for your scenario.
The main difference between this two way is that Web role allows you to connect to it through remote desktop.
You can keep using WebApp and configure Auto Scaling (based on CPU usage or at a specific time).
Related
This has to be a pretty simple task. I have an Azure Cloud Service that works just fine with HTTP and HTTPS. Now I want to create a net.tcp connection to the cloud service. The first thing I discover is that net.tcp is not supported by IIS Express. That's fine. So I try switching to regular IIS and all I get when I try to run the application is a 404 error. If I was building an WCF Web Application, I would get a form that allows me to select (and build) the virtual directory for the application, but there's no analog for this in the Cloud Service.
I can take a fresh 'Cloud Service' project build using visual studio, make no changes to it except change IIS Express to IIS. When I launch it, I get a 404 error in the web browser.
Does anyone have a working example of tcp.net (with IIS Express or standard IIS) in a Cloud Service?
This video by the Azure team is a great overview and cleared up a lot of conceptual issues I had. An Azure Cloud Service is a container around one or more virtual machines. The virtual machines basically come in two flavors: Web Role and Worker Role. What threw me is the description that the Worker Role was intended for background processes: not true. A Web Role is basically a VM with IIS, a Worker Role is basically a VM without IIS. Since the off-the-shelf IIS doesn't have net.tcp installed, you have to jump through hoops in order to get the protocol installed. Instead, the Worker Role can be used as a self-hosted web service. If you want the performance and throughput of TCP, this appears to be the direction to go.
Azure VM, Cloud service or Web job?
I have a configurable console application which runs continuosly. Currently it is running on a VM and consumes lot of memory (it is basically doing data mining).
The current requirement is to have multiple instances of this application with different set of configuration which can be changed by specific users.
So where should I host this application such that the configuration can be modified using some front end which provides access managements(like Sharepoint),ability to stop it/restart (like WCF service) without logging on the VM?
I am open to any suggestions/ideas. Thanks
I don't think there's any sold answer to this question as there is the preference variable but for what it's worth, if it were up to me I would deploy it against individual azure VM's for each specific set of users. That way if the server resources went up because of config changes the user group made it is isolated to that group, and with azure, will scale automatically to meet the resource demand. Then just build a little .net web app to allow user to authenticate and change configuration settings.
You could expose an "admin" endpoint for your service (obviously you need authentication here!) that:
1. can return the current configuration
2. accept new configuration
3. restart the service (if needed). Stopping the service will be harder, since that leaves the question on how to start it again.
Then you need to write your own (or use a 3-party (like sharepoint or a CMS)) application that will handle your users and under the hood consume your "admin" endpoint.
Edit: The hosting part: If I understand you correctly your app is just an console application today, and you don't know how to host it? Well, there are many answers to that question. If you have a operations department go talk to them, if you are on your own play around and see what fits you and your environment best!
My tip: go for a http/https protocol/interface - just because there are many web host out there, and you can easy find tools for that protocol. if you are on the .NET platform check out Web.API or OWASP
Azure now has Machine learning to process data mining.
You should check if it's suit to you.
Otherwise, you can use Webjob:
Allow you to have multiple instances of your long time running job (Webjon scaling out).
AppSettings can be change from the Azure Portal or using the Azure Management API
i am new in wcf and started learning. i got one confusion like that i create a small wcf service and just do not host it in IIS,console apps or win service but from another apps i can add the service reference of svc file and found it is working. if wcf can work without hosting in any place like "IIS,console apps or win service " then why people would alway host wcf service in IIS,console apps or win service. can anyone tell me the reason.
people use IIS and windows services in general because they are simpler to setup and run more consistently. they can also be hosted more easily on servers where the services can be configured to start automatically, and as usually wcf is used as a server communication method it is usually this that you want to do.
hosting in console applications is generally easier to setup for simple examples for testing purposes, when you want to test your services locally.
Whilst hosting in applications as possible it's a less common scenario to use wcf to communicate between 2 applications on the same machine.
EDIT:
Your original question asked why people always talk about IIS, services etc. The point I was making was that usually wcf is used for web services, and is usually run on a server other than the local machine. Even though it can be used for inter process communication on the same machine this is not the most common use case. This is why you see a lot of examples using IIS and not too many hosting it in a Windows forms app.
My head hurts so much I think I need a bottle of aspirin...
I've created a WCF service and, with help of others from this site and the department I work in, the WCF service is running as a service on my development machine. Tested it with a console app and it works.
But, it's not supposed to be on my development machine. It needs to be on a different server.
This is difficult because the server it is supposed to reside on DOES NOT have Visual Studio installed on it.
So I cannot run the VS 2008 Command Prompt with installutil to run the WCF service as a service on that server.
Broadly speaking, you've got three options, all of which are described on MSDN:
Host the service under IIS
Self-host the service in any managed .NET application
Host the WCF service under a Windows Service
Which one is right for you depends on what your service is for, how it'll be consumed, how scalable and secure you need the set-up to be, and a dozen other things besides. Without knowing a bit more about what your service does and how it'll be used in your organisation, it's difficult to make a recommendation.
IIS hosting is easy to set up and is the way to go if you want to leverage all of the industrial-strength hosting functionality that a full-blown web server offers.
Self-hosting is quick and easy - you can knock out a WCF-hosting console app in two minutes flat - but is the clunky solution. You of course have to run the host application as a particular Windows user. Perhaps not ideal?
Hosting under a Windows service is the middle ground. It gives you that always-available functionality without having to be logged in as a specific user, but doesn't offer the configurability and scalability of the IIS solution. It takes a bit more effort than belting out a quick console app, but not much.
The server that the windows service will reside on will have the .NET Framework. INSTALLUTIL is located in the Microsoft.NET\Framework(version number) folder in the Windows directory.
For example, C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727.
No need to write a console app to host your service now (unless you want to).
You can also host your WCF service under IIS, check this out: MSDN - How to: Host a WCF Service in IIS. It really is just a five minute job :)
Summary:
Does anybody know if there are known issues or configuration gotchas with an IIS service connecting to an Azure based service?
Scenario:
I currently have a scenario that requires me to host two web-services, one in Azure, and one on a server running IIS. The IIS hosted service (a WCF service) connects to the Azure hosted service (actually the Azure storage API) in order to fetch certain information. This information is manipulated and returned to the client.
Client -> IIS Service -> Azure Storage Service
Issue:
I'm running into issues with the IIS service connecting to the Azure Service. The hostname cannot be resolved. I'm using the Azure Storage client from my code, but have actually tried this using the azure API calls, and they also do not work from IIS. I captured the requests using Fiddler (on a different machine), they match the azure REST API calls, as expected. These requests, when made outside of IIS on the host machine execute properly. It is only when they are issued by the IIS service that they fail.
In my research other people have been running into this issue when there's a firewall problem, but since I can hit the service properly from the machine, that doesn't seem to fit the bill. My hunch is that there's a configuration issue I need to sort out in IIS, but I've failed to find anything useful with my searches.
Does anyone have any information on why this might be occuring (known bugs, gotchas etc)? Any workarounds? From a SOA perspective, this seems fairly critical to understand.
Any assitance anyone has would be helpful. Thank you.
Sounds like a proxy configuration issue. Check how your IIS server connected to Internet. If you are using some sort of proxy to get to Internet, that connection has to be configured correctly.
Specifically, if your proxy servers are Microsoft ISA server, or Microsoft Forefront TMG, then you need to check two things:
ISA server client or Forefront TMG client software is installed on the server
The account used by IIS application pool is domain user. ISA Server/TMG are designed to work only with user account, not service account. Alternative workaround for this limitation is using "defaultProxy" configuration in web.config, however it only wokrs for HTTP/HTTPS.
If you use different proxy server, then other issues might be involved, for example proxy might require authentication.