Improve the experience of deploying my application to Windows Azure.
AdminMike Wickstrand
(Admin, Microsoft Windows Azure) shared this idea
At PDC 2010, we announced a number of enhancements to the operator experience on Azure. These include a completely redesigned portal, access to new diagnostic information, a vastly simplified sign-up process, and scenario-based forums to help answer questions and facilitate knowledge sharing.
These Windows Azure enhancements will be generally available by the end of 2010.
Please continue to let us know how we can improve the deployment experience on Windows Azure for you.
34 comments
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P Ohms
commented
Deployment times are abysmal. Having come from EC2 to work on Azure, it's a huge frustration. It is simply not usable. For a small app single instance, we see deployment times in the range of 8-15 minutes (heavily skewed to the upper end) and for a deployment of 5 machines the time varies between 30-50 minutes. It's appauling. Upload time of the application is fine, it's just deployment itself takes forever.
The path we've not tried, but perhaps should is doing development in a VM with VS2010 installed. For now, we've been using VS on development machines and uploading either via the web UI or from VS itself.
EC2 was massively better. Development locally, upload binaries and open source tools to VM, enable debugger on VM, get staging working. Replicate, deploy, done. Breeze.
Why are there no tools to help with diagnostics and logging from MSFT? The integration of tables in VS is read-only and having to use generic third party table manipulation tools is a pain.
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Jason R. Craig
commented
I agree, it seems slow as molasses!!! We also need better diagnostics and logging for these processes.
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Juan
commented
I am amazed with the speed now.. It is horrible!!!. I remember my early trials where I could deploy a web worker role in no time (even from a wifi connection from a train). Now it takes 20 minutes or more to discover you have a small error, and start the process again. It is easier for me to manage my own server.
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Fabrice Marguerie
commented
I can't stand how long it takes to deploy!
I don't even talk about the failures after more than 20 minutes of useless wait! -
Tom Mallard
commented
Found the trick, upload to a storage blob and deploy from there, way faster ... found this on Nileesha's Space on Azure & Java woes.
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PulsarBlow
commented
Tonight, deploying a WebRole on an extra-small instance took me 54min (EU Datacenters) !?
Come on guys, are you kidding us ? -
ray247
commented
I agree with Shaun, deployment taking too long is not acceptable even though you've re-designed a better deployment UI.
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Shaun
commented
Haris -- The revamped UI is slick. However, the primary complaint shared by many users is that the deployment process is slow. I have been using Azure since CTP and I haven't seen any improvement in provisioning time.
The emulator is based on SQL Server and there are several runtime behavior differences between the emulator and cloud. A complex product will show these differences and require test time on an actual cloud implementation. Having to wait five, ten, or fifteen minutes for a deployment is unacceptable. I hope Microsoft works to remedy the role instance provisioning process. -
CuriousGeorge
commented
A pain point for me is when I need to update 1 or 2 files in a web app. It requires a full redeploy. I would love a way to make minor changes to an app simple (with multi instance hosting of course). WebDeploy as announced at PDC only works for single instance, but something that simple would be perfect.
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Kris
commented
Where is this Silverlight Azure portal? The initializing-busy-stopping loop is making me very sad.
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Jonas
commented
Is there any signup to complete in order to get access to the new portal right now? Or do we have to wait until it gets rolled out?
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Kalep Kalepicus
commented
Also greatly improved with the possibility of installing Webdeploy in a single instance to turn arround code at development time. I really feel this has been fulfilled.
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We announced some enhancements to the diagnostic and operator experience at PDC 2010. Specifically, we've introduced a completely redesigned Silverlight based Windows Azure portal to provide a more streamlined and intuitive interface, and new diagnostic information, including the ability to click on a role to see role type, deployment time and last reboot time. Please try the new experience out, and let us know how we can continue to improve the deployment experience for you!
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ShaunT
commented
The experience remains very poor. Very frustrating.
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scheinkultur
commented
I totally agree with Simon... This is by far the most important thing to improve... This would save any developer so much time...
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Simon Lampen
commented
Hi Mike,
I have spent at least a day going through the dozen or so causes of the dreaded initializing-busy-stopping loop. Basic diagnostics in this area are critical. At the moment this is a totally blind area. Ironically I have had to use an amazon 64 bit machine to help diagnose some of the issues and I still don't have a web role that will start yet.
A great option would be a console like feature as we see in the dev fabric that could tell us "BadImageFormatException" for xyz.dll, or filenotfound nesteddependency.dll, incorrect storage connection string etc. -
cmyworld commented
Major issue we face with Azure deployment is no support for partial updates to the package. Any small change made should be redeployed which itself takes 20-30 mins. Image in a web role just adding a link to a page or something such small requires us to deploy everything again :(
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offbeatmammal
commented
sitting here watching another deployment that's got as far as "Up" on a progress bar that says "Upgrading Domain 1 of 2" after an hour.... this is really painful.
please... give us:
(a) more visibility into what's actually going on
(b) an option to cancel
... as it stands I don't even have an option to force the environment to stop / delete the service and recreate it / know when I can actually test that the production deployment worked. -
dsmithazure
commented
Specifically when attempting to deploy and an instance fails to load because something is missing or an error in the init code. It can take up to 2 hours (or what seems about 120-150 automatic restarts) before you can reload up again. A way to cancel this would be excellent!
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Gaurav Mantri
commented
Hi,
May I suggest you take a look at Cloud Storage Studio especially the subscriptions management component of it. It is implemented using Service Management API. There are few things that I would like to mention here:
1. Because it is a client side utility, you can circumvent the normal "browser timeout" issues you may run into when deploying very large packages (50 MB+).
2. Recently we added a feature where create deployment is a one step process, instead of regular two step process: Deploy and Run. Now while creating a deployment, you can instruct Cloud Storage Studio to automatically start your application after deployment is done.
To get more information and download, please visit our website: http://www.cerebrata.com/Products/CloudStorageStudio
Thanks
Gaurav Mantri
Cerebrata Software
