The Wasabi Hands on Labs give you a good look at
the basic mechanics, but I don’t find
the setup too practical. Using a local console application to host
the Autoscaler and rules files is probably
the (IMHO) least likely architecture. Far more common would be hosting in a service on premise (if you want to have
the Autoscaler local) or most likely, host it in a Azure role of it’s own. I chose to go
the Azure route. First step was to get
the rules.xml and
the services.xml files into
the cloud. I tend to be a “one step at a time” sort of
guy, so running
the console application with
the rules sitting in a Azure hosted set of blobs seemed to be
the logical first step. Here are
the steps: 1) Create a container in
the storage account you wish to use. Name does not matter, you will get a chance to set
the container name (as well as
the file names) in
the app.config 2) Copy
the two files from where you created them to your container. I used
the same files I had locally. I made
the container public to eliminate security issues, but in
the final application, a bit of security needs to be applied (one problem at a time).
The content type was set to text/xml. I found one reference claiming
the importance of this step, and it makes sense. 3) Adjust
the app.config to set
the location of
the files. This will let you set all
the storage account and key information needed to reach into
the cloud form your console application.
The sections of your app.config will look like this: <rulesStores>
<add name="Blob Rules Store" type="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.WindowsAzure.Autoscaling.Rules.Configuration.BlobXmlFileRulesStore, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.WindowsAzure.Autoscaling, Version=5.0.1118.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"
blobContainerName="[ContainerName]" blobName="rules.xml" storageAccount="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=[StorageAccount];AccountKey=[AccountKey]"
monitoringRate="00:00:30" certificateThumbprint="" certificateStoreLocation="LocalMachine"
checkCertificateValidity="false" />
</rulesStores>
<serviceInformationStores>
<add name="Blob Service Information Store" type="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.WindowsAzure.Autoscaling.ServiceModel.Configuration.BlobXmlFileServiceInformationStore, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.WindowsAzure.Autoscaling, Version=5.0.1118.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"
blobContainerName="[ContainerName]" blobName="services.xml" storageAccount="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=[StorageAccount];AccountKey=[AccountKey]"
monitoringRate="00:00:30" certificateThumbprint="" certificateStoreLocation="LocalMachine"
checkCertificateValidity="false" />
</serviceInformationStores>
Once I had
the files up in
the sky, I renamed
the local copies to just to make my self feel better about
the application using
the correct set of rules and services.
Deploy
the web role to
the cloud. Once it is up and running, start
the console application. You should find
the application scales up and down in response to
the buttons on
the web site. Tune in next time for moving
the hosting of
the Autoscaler to a worker role, discussions on getting
the logging information into diagnostics into storage, and a set of discussions about certs and how they play a role.
