jorkeo - hosting geek : Architecture

Developers Developers Developers – Steve Ballmer in Australia

jorkeo — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 03:21:00 GMT

As part of a whirlwind visit to Sydney early next month, Steve Ballmer will be presenting Microsoft's future vision for developers in the world of software-plus-services. He'll discuss the next wave of technologies just launched at the Professional Developer Conference. There will also be a live Q&A session with Steve.

Immediately following Steve’s session, we’ll drill into the Software + Services vision even deeper with Microsoft Directors Gianpaolo Carraro and Tim Sneath, delivering sessions on “Understanding Cloud Computing” and “Amazing Software Experiences for Windows and the Web”. Although all the seats at the Sydney event are gone, we’ll be streaming live and a number of user groups are running events around the country to get together and watch the stream.

Watch the stream from here : http://www.microsoft.com.au/powertodevelopers/

Or if you are in Brisbane, watch it locally at the Queensland MSDN User Group

-jorke

Technorati Tags: Steve Baller,Power to Developers,Microsoft,Azure,Cloud

Infrastructure Architecture Design Questions

jorkeo — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 04:44:11 GMT

This is very interesting and fairly comprehensive list of basic operational questions to ask when building the infrastructure on your web facing project - from the Microsoft.com operations team.

I love the breakdown of availability, this is something I've had lots of discussions with people in the past - and I've found it a pretty good measure of priorities in the past:

Availability %	Downtime per year	Downtime per month*		Downtime per week
98%	7.30 days		14.4 hours	3.36 hours
99%	3.65 days		7.20 hours	1.68 hours
99.5%	1.83 days		3.60 hours	50.4 min
99.9%	8.76 hours		43.2 min	10.1 min
99.99%	52.6 min		4.32 min	1.01 min
99.999%	5.26 min		25.9 sec	6.05 sec
99.9999%	31.5 sec		2.59 sec	0.605 sec

The hardest question for anyone starting a new project is answering performance questions - how to test this without over-engineering and blowing out cost?

- jorke

Technorati Tags: Ms.com,architecture,Microsoft,hosting,infrastructure

What size footprint does your worker process leave?

jorkeo — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:43:00 GMT

Well it all depends on what you are cramming into your request pipeline! With IIS7's modular architecture you have the ability to load only what you need to run. What does this mean - well let's look at the footprint of a worker process that has all default modules loaded, i.e. ASP/ASP.NET/CGI/Authorization etc etc.

To see the footprint in its entirety we want to dump out the applications loaded and see their usage. For this I have a handy PowerShell script I whacked together (because I love PowerShell); So browse to your website to spin up a worker process then run the following at a PowerShell prompt:

gps -name w3wp | select -expand Modules | where {$_.Filename -like '*\inetsrv*} | ft

which should give you something like the following:

this shows the footprint of a worker module with a default install of IIS 7.0 - you can see all the various modules loaded there for authorization, authentication, gzip etc. So how big is our worker process with no modules? Well simply rip the <globalmodules> out of the applicationhost.config file - NOT RECOMMENDED - without backup up your config first of course. Now browse to your site and you will notice nothing happens...- because you've ripped out all the modules there is nothing to process the request - thus you will get a naked worker process - lets take a look:

So you can see with IIS7 you can really customize what happens in your request pipeline to make huge differences to the size of your worker processes. Neat eh?

Now I've also found out you can do the same as PowerShell script by simply running:

tasklist /fi "imagename eq w3wp.exe" /M

but where's the fun in that.. :)

-jorke