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NNUG - Global Azure Bootcamp 2015

This is a collection of workshop assignments that was given during NNUG's Global Azure Bootcamp 2015 @ Bouvet on 25. April 2015.

Overview of assignments

  • Store orders in Azure Table Storage
  • Send and retrieve orders to/from an Azure Service Bus Topic
  • Create and deploy an Azure WebJob

Before you begin

If you are going to follow all of the steps in this assignment, then make sure you have all of the prerequisites:

  • Have a PC with Visual Studio 2013 Update 4
  • Have installed the latest version of Azure SDK
  • Have an account for the Azure-portal with an active subscription
  • Have Azure Storage Explorer (or a similar storage explorer application) for viewing Table Storage data. You can also use Visual Studio's Server Explorer.

How to start

There are folders created for each assignment, including a FinalSolution folder which contains the suggested final solution. You may start at any folder you like.

For a challenge, open the solution in the FinalSolution-folder and go to Assignment #4 where you will increase performance by re-implementing serialization, scaling, re-implementing storage etc.

Resources

WebJobs

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/websites-dotnet-webjobs-sdk-service-bus/

http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/01/azure-webjobs-are-awesome-and-you.html

http://channel9.msdn.com/Tags/azurefridaywebjobs

https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk-samples/tree/master/BasicSamples

Azure

https://resources.azure.com/

http://www.kcode.me/post/azure-service-bus-brokeredmessage-serialization

Producer / Consumer

http://www.ni.com/white-paper/3023/en/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/sqs_super_queue/

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/hh528527.aspx

Disclaimer

The code in this assignment have been created to be consise and light by purpose, and is intended to be educational rather than production-ready. There are minimal efforts to be resilient and error handling is minimal.

Estimated assignment duration

2-4 hours

Questions?

Contact us:

Background

You work as an independent consultant and have been contracted by Contoso Inc. to help them implement their new e-commerce website.

Their old website didn't handle high-volume traffic and they lost business over popular holidays when orders coming in were dropped because their website couldn't handle the load. Therefore it is a critical requirement that the new solution will take care of every single order that comes in, especially during peak traffic.

They have staff to handle orders coming in manually should the website go down, but the orders must not be lost once they have been entered!

They've hired you as a specialist in leveraging the power of the Cloud to ensure a new and better performing website. To start things off they would like you to create a proof-of-concept solution before going into a full blown project, so the tasks are small in scope and requirements for UX and GUI are minimal. At this stage they are mainly concerned with creating a skeleton-solution that delivers on their primary requirements. Your main goals are therefore to maximize throughput of order placements and ensure consistent data throughout the order process, from order inception until it's stored.

Assignment #1 - Store to Azure Table Storage

You have already created two console applications that can produce orders. These act as a substitute for a website with users creating orders. One takes in order details as input from the console (GAB.Console.ManualInput), the other creates a high volume of orders randomly in order to simulate high volume traffic (GAB.Console.AutomaticInput). Both applications have been designed to run locally on a developer computer.

You need to create a component for storing orders to Azure Table Storage.

Alter the GAB.Console.ManualInput and GAB.Console.AutomaticInput-applications so that they store orders to a table in Azure Table Storage.

  1. Replace the class InMemoryOrderStorage with a new class in GAB.Infrastructure.Azure.Consumer called AzureTableStorageOrderStorage.

  2. Implement the methods Store and GetTotalNumberOfOrders in AzureTableStorageOrderStorage

2.1) Make sure your Store-method creates the table orders if it doesn't already exist.

2.2) Use the OrderEntity-class for storing an order and map from Order to OrderEntity before you store the order.

  1. Ensure you have set an appSetting named StorageConnectionString in the App.config of the console-applications. Get the your Storage Account connection string from the Azure portal and add it to the configuration as follows:

  2. Run the console applications and watch as orders are stored using a Storage Explorer tool or Visual Studio's Team Explorer. Also, use the console application GAB.Console.ConsumerOutput to monitor the throughput.

Definition of Done: You can run these console applications and watch as they generate orders and store them into your orders table.

Assignment #2 - Send orders to an Azure Service Bus Topic

Now that you can store orders using a Producer, the next step is for the Producer to send orders to a Service Bus Topic. You will later write a component that consumes the orders from the Topic.

Alter the GAB.Console.ManualInput and GAB.Console.AutomaticInput-applications so that they send orders to a Topic on an Azure Service Bus.

  1. Create an Azure Service Bus and a Topic called order-dispatch.

1.1) Go to https://manage.windowsazure.com

1.2) Click on + New and select App Services->Service Bus->Topic->Custom Create.

1.3) Enter the following details:

Topic Name: order-dispatch

Region: Select your closest region

Namespace: Create a new namespace

Namespace Name: < your initials >-gab-oslo-2015-ns.servicebus.windows.net

1.4) Click Next and set "Default Message Time To Live" to 5 Minutes. Click Complete. Note: We use a very low value to make it easier to get to a clean state (empty queue/topic). More info about TimeToLive

1.5) Once the Service Bus has been created, click on it and go to the tab Topics and click on order-dispatch.

1.6) Click on the tab Configure and go down to Shared access policies and create a policy called SendListen that have the permissions Send and Listen. Click Save. Note the generated Primary Key, use it in step 1.7.

1.7) Configure appSettings for connecting to the Topic. In both GAB.Console.AutomaticInput and GAB.Console.ManualInput, add these keys to App.config:

<appSettings>
    <add key="ServiceBusAddress" value="sb://<service bus namespace>.servicebus.windows.net/"/>
    <add key="ServiceBusAccessKey" value="<policy primary key>"/>
    <add key="ServiceBusAccessKey" value="SendListen"/>
</appSettings>

  1. Create a new class AzureServiceBusTopicOrderSender in GAB.Infrastructure.Azure.Producer that implements IOrderSender.

  2. Implement the methods SendOrders and SendOrder in AzureServiceBusTopicOrderSender

Definition of Done: You can now run these console applications and watch them generate orders and store them onto the order-dispatch topic.

Assignment #3 - Use an Azure WebJob that consumes orders via a Service Bus Topic

Now that you have orders being sent to the Service Bus Topic, the next step is to consume orders placed onto the Topic. This consumer will be implemented as an Azure WebJob. Use the existing project GAB.OrderConsumerWebJob to listen for order messages that are put onto the Topic, and send them into your Azure Table Storage order table.

  1. Add the appropriate method parameters in the ProcessTopicMessage-method in Functions.cs
  • Use the following classes as parameters: ServiceBusTrigger and Table.
  1. Create the WebApp-container that will host your WebJob.

2.1) Open https://portal.azure.com and click on + New in the bottom left corner:

2.2) Choose Web + Mobile->Web App:

2.3) Enter the following details:

URL: < your initials >-gab-oslo-2015

App Service Plan: Select one of the Basic plans in order to test scaling later on. This can be downgraded to Free after you're done with these assignments.

Resource Group: Select a resource group or create one close to your Service Bus region.

2.4) Click Create.

  1. Add connectionStrings to your Service Bus and Storage Account in the GAB.OrderConsumerWebJob-project's App.config.

3.1) Also, update the App.config in the 3 console applications by adding a connection string to your Service Bus and Storage Account.

3.2) In order to use the WebJob Dashboard you need to provide the WebApp with connection strings to your storage account and service bus. Go to the new WebApp and navigate to All settings->Application Settings and under Connection Strings enter your 3 connectionStrings from the App.config in GAB.OrderConsumerWebJob:

  1. Publish the WebJob to Azure. You will create a publish profile during publishing if this is your first WebApp-publish. Right-click on the GAB.OrderConsumerWebJob-project and select Publish as Azure WebJob.

4.1) Click on Microsoft Azure Web Apps to create a new publish profile.

4.2) Under Existing Web Apps, select the one you just created and click Ok.

4.3) Click on Publish.

  1. Run either GAB.Console.ManualInput or GAB.Console.AutomaticInput, and monitor on the WebJob dashboard at https://< webapp name >.scm.azurewebsites.net/azurejobs/#/jobs as it picks messages off of the Topic order-dispatch. Also, use the console application GAB.Console.ConsumerOutput to monitor the throughput as the WebJob saves the order messages to the table orders.

Definition of Done: You can run either input-application and the orders will be sent to the order-dispatch Topic. Once a message arrives to the Topic, the WebJob should trigger your static WebJob-method and the order should then be stored into your orders table.

  • Note that after running a while, the throughput increases slowly. This is the Azure-infrastructure adapting to the volume of traffic. Let it input-application run for about 5 minutes and see how high the throughput goes.

Assignment #4 - Increase performance and throughput

Identify ways to increase throughput and try to implement them.

  • Think of ways to make orders travel faster through the service bus topic.

  • Measure throughputs when you make changes in order to assess the different effects each change has to the order throughput

  • You could consider discarding the WebJob and instead implement another component that uses the more traditional topic subscription alternative, and use subscription filtering to conditionally fetch messages. Ideally this alternative should also be scalable.

Areas for improvement might include:

  • improve order serialization
    • Read this article for an overview of performance differences of different serialization implementations.
  • optimizing the scaling of the WebJob
    • Warning: you will probably need to increase your payment plan in order to scale out the WebJob.
  • switch between storage implementations (Table Storage, DocumentDB etc.)
  • synchronous vs asynchronous