After 7 years on Geeks with Blogs I’m moving on, you’ll find me now at: Elton Stoneman’s new blog - https://blog.sixeyed.com RSS - https://blog.sixeyed.com/rss The guys at GWB do a great job – over the years they’ve hosted hundreds of thousands of page views for me But the lure of simple publishing with Ghost, simple hosting with Azure Web Apps, and ......

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As part of Camp Pluralsight, you can watch my IDisposable Best Practices for C# Developers course free right now, even without a Pluralsight subscription. IDisposable is at the heart of .NET. This course will teach you all about implementing and using IDisposable in C#, and show you what goes wrong if you don't use IDisposable, so you know why you need ......

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You can run HBase in the cloud with Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce or Microsoft’s HDInsight, but for local development and testing you don’t need a full-on cluster backed by Hadoop storage, you want something leaner (and cheaper). HBase is pretty straightforward to install and run locally, using the native filesystem so you don’t need HDFS. You can run ......

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This is the last one for the time being – how to get blob metrics for a Storage Account using the Azure Management Libraries, in the same way that I covered Cloud Services and Web Apps. Storage is different from compute in terms of what data is available, and what it is you want to see. I still want overall status and how hard the account is working, ......

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This follows on from my last post, Hey Azure, how’s my Cloud Service doing? and it looks at getting similar metrics for Web Apps (née “Azure Websites”). Web Apps expose a lot of the same detail as Cloud Services through the service APIs, although the content isn’t exactly the same. Here’s how my dashboard looks with key details for one running Web App: ......

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The Azure Management APIs give you a lot of useful stats and you can easily use them to build a customised dashboard for an instant healthcheck of your Azure estate. Documentation is a little sketchy though, so this is the first of (probably) many posts detailing how to pull stats out for different Azure services. First off you'll need a management ......

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If you want to use the Azure Resource Management APIs, Service Management APIs or Management Libraries, you'll need a management certificate which authenticates your process with the Azure subscription you're accessing. Chances are you'll already have one or more management certs installed (from Visual Studio or the PowerShell SDK or WebMatrix) with ......

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This post has moved!

The updated version is on the new blog here:

Configure an HDInsight HBase cluster that doesn't keep going BANG! with 502s

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My latest Pluralsight course is out now, it's about building Big Data solutions using .NET technologies: Real World Big Data in Azure The typical Big Data stack (think Kafka, Cassandra, Kibana and the Hadoop ecosystem) is heavily Java based. Microsoft have taken the best of those technologies and made them available as managed services in Azure, but ......

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I’ve written before about cloud performance testing tools and how good they are - in fact they rank highly in my Five Essential Tools for Building REST APIs. Both loader.io and blitz.io use a similar mechanism to ensure that you own the domain you're about to load test. They generate a unique ID and ask you to put that in the root of your domain. Before ......

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