We have recently started to use cluster servers in our company. I have done some reading on MS WebDeploy and the technology looks promising. Our requirements:
Create backups before deployment
Deploy to different servers
Test server
Two live clusters
Ability to stop application pools for specific web applications before publish and start them again afterward
Allowing limited access: In other words a developer may only publish to sites that they are responsible for
Possible customisation: We would like to disallow publishes if related bugs have not been solved in our bug tracker, and possibly more, like approvals from management. Can external customisations be done without losing VS integration
Visual Studio integration and the use of Web.config transforms
SQL Schema changes and especially stored procedures without affecting data
Our environment
IIS 7
Windows Server 2008
SQL Server 2005 (Planned move to 2008)
Visual Studio 2010
Based on my research it does seem that many of the above requirements have been met. What I would like to know is how reliable the solution is and whether the above requirements will be met. More importantly I would like to know what your personal experiences with webdeploy are and whether you would recommend it or whether there are better alternatives.
At the moment we are using file copying which proves to be unreliable (due to human error) and tedious.
We do about 80% of what your asking for using WebDeploy packaging and Thoughtworks GO! for orchestration of our release pipeline. It works really well. We have over a 100 websites/services and deploy something to production every four hours. The following post describes how we perform the deployment and links to related information:
http://www.dotnetcatch.com/2016/12/28/zero-downtime-clustered-deployment-of-webdeploy-packages-via-powershell/
One note, config transforms happen at build time which is problematic when you want to deploy to multiple environments. WebDeploy parameterization accomplishes the same result but is applied at deploy time. Check it out -
http://www.dotnetcatch.com/2014/09/08/parameterizationpreview-visual-studio-extension/
Related
platform: ASP.NET 4.5, MVC 4, C#
I'm currently designing a website that's available on the public domain. However, there is a meaningful % of my target market that would be uncomfortable putting some information on a public site, even if it's https etc.
What I'd like to be able to do is allow corporate users use my site, and one way to do that is to allow them to host my website on their intranet. The usual disadvantages are, of course, that they don't get their site updated as fast as the public one would, and it's also a headache for me in terms of support.
My questions are
What are some strategies to make "corporate friendly" deployments easy and hassle-free?
Are there ways I could keep the site public with just the database inside the intranet (can't see how... but then I'm no techno-know-all)
If I have no choice but to make it locally hosted - then what's the best way to do it to keep my development/support overheads at a minimum?
I hope the mods don't lock this. I'm asking for specific methods and technical approaches to a very real problem.
Thank you,
For #1, there's a many facets to the question. A couple thoughts that might help you think it out:
Deploying your app: Make it simple to deploy, and to upgrade, between versions of your application. Try to make it happen as a single operation, not upgrading different parts by hand manually. As Darin Dimitrov mentioned, you could look into a technology like Web Deployment Packages, especially with Visual Studio 2012 which will have incremental database publishing (in VS2010, the database was non-incremental so there wasn't really an "update" story). Keep the cost of deployment down so that they can afford to upgrade more frequently (not the cost of your product, but the overhead of who's getting paid to keep the system updated and running).
Consider differences between running on the Internet and on an Intranet: For example, authentication on the Internet is usually done with forms based authentication. On an intranet, you may want to consider supporting Windows authentication for a seamless login experience for corporate users. This should impact your designs to allow authentication to be modular between your deployments.
Corporate adoption of newer technologies might be slower than you want: You're using the latest and greatest (ASP.NET 4.5/MVC4). Some companies might not be prepared to deploy this now, or for a couple years. Consider if you could use an older, established technology, such as .NET 4 - having been out for a few years, it's already somewhat proven and has adoption.
For your 2nd question, it comes down to what their IT is willing to accommodate. Many corporate sites have the database within a secured LAN, but the web server is accessible from the public Internet. It's certainly a well-understood network design, but depending on the assets involved in your application, your customers may or may not agree to it. This one's a business decision.
For #3 the answer is common to any long term software project. It has to be high quality and maintainable if you want to minimize the hassle.
If you're only going to support the last N versions, make that very clear. Avoid supporting code that you're already fixed long in the past. Consider providing extra support or affordable upgrades to keep your customers on newer (and hopefully better) releases.
Keep in mind what components need to be upgraded between versions. Your web app (obviously), but also your database schema and any dependencies or libraries you're using. This is mostly the same considerations as #1. Make sure you have a good plan for upgrades and rollbacks.
Most importantly, test, test, test. Have functional regression tests and install/upgrade tests, and try out as many possibilities as you can think of.
Answer to only 1) above.
I would recommend a continuous integration tool. We use TeamCity and deploy mvc3 and mvc4 applications to our public as well as privately hosted sites with a click of a button. Previously, we used cruise control, but now we are more satisfied with TeamCity. Read up on them. Might lead you in the right direction.
You may checkout Visual Studio's Web Deployment Packages. They allow you to prepare a package that could directly be installed on your client's web servers.
All,
My dev team and I would like to setup a development environment for our ASP.NET projects. BY development environment i do not mean Visual Studio. I mean, that we have a Database Server, a Application Server and a Web Server in a 'Development Environment'.
We want to use this as our integration environment. Where the developers all work on there parts of ASP.NET Applications and then we can push our new changes up to test them as a whole.
My Question is , what is the best way to deploy our code together without stepping on our toes?
Thanks.
Team Foundation Server is a good candidate for this.
You need a source code control methodology and with it you'll get the benefits you're searching for. SVN and other solutions in this space offer "conflict resolution" to avoid inadvertent overwriting/toe squashing.
Setup a subversion repository, get all of the developers up to speed on svn and using it.
Once you have your source under control you can consider setting up a continuous integration server which can build your code and deploy to your target environment in batch. Organizing your project code properly into trunk, tags and branches per solution will make it very easy to control what is deployed or redeployed to your dev environment at any given time.
There are other options for source code control (git, tfs, and many others) but they all offer close to the same features... SVN is one of the nicer options because it's open source, free and stable.
Another thing to consider is keeping your database schema changes in sync with your code changes. Consider using migrator.net or similar solution to enable your team to keep everything in sync through revisions, including database state.
Ok, so here's the thing.
I'm developing an existing (it started being an ASP classic app, so you can imagine :P) web application under ASP.NET 4.0 and SQLServer 2005. We are 4 developers using local instances of SQL Server 2005 Express, having the source-code and the Visual Studio database project
This webapp has several "universes" (that's how we call it). Every universe has its own database (currently on the same server) but they all share the same schema (tables, sprocs, etc) and the same source/site code.
So manually deploying is really annoying, because I have to deploy the source code and then run the sql scripts manually on each database. I know that manual deploying can cause problems, so I'm looking for a way of automating it.
We've recently created a Visual Studio Database Project to manage the schema and generate the diff-schema scripts with different targets.
I don't have idea how to put the pieces together
I would like to:
Have a way to make a "sync" deploy to a target server (thanksfully I have full RDC access to the servers so I can install things if required). With "sync" deploy I mean that I don't want to fully deploy the whole application, because it has lots of files and I just want to deploy those new or changed.
Generate diff-sql update scripts for every database target and combine it to just 1 script. For this I should have some list of the databases names somewhere.
Copy the site files and executing the generated sql script in an easy and automated way.
I've read about MSBuild, MS WebDeploy, NAnt, etc. But I don't really know where to start and I really want to get rid of this manual deploy.
If there is a better and easier way of doing it than what I enumerated, I'll be pleased to read your option.
I know this is not a very specific question but I've googled a lot about it and it seems I cannot figure out how to do it. I've never used any automation tool to deploy.
Any help will be really appreciated,
Thank you all,
Regards
Have you heard of the term Multi-Tenancy? It might be worth look that up to see if that applied to your "Multiverse" especially if one universe is never accessed by another...
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitenancy
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479086.aspx
UPDATE:
If the application and database is the same for each client (or Tenant) I believe there are applications that may help in providing the same code/db as an SaaS application? ie another application/configuration layer on top that can handle the deployments etc?
I think these are called Platform as a Service (PaaS) applications:
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service
Multi-Tenancy in your case may be possible, depending on client security requirements, with a bit of work (or a lot of work):
Option 1:
You could use the one instance of the application, ie deploy the site once and connect to a different database for each client. You would need to differentiate each client by URL to isolate content/data byt setting a connection string for each etc. (This would reduce your site deployments to one deployment)
Option 2:
You could create both a single instance of the application and use a single database. You would need to add a "TenantID" to each table and adjust all your code to accept a TenantID to ensure data security/isolation. Again you wold need to detect/differentiate the Tenant based on the URL to set the TenantID for the session used for every database call. (This would reduce your site and database deployment to one of each)
We have been a ColdFusion shop for 10 years, and are now switching over to ASP.net MVC. Our target framework is .net 4.0 BETA 2 using VS 2010 BETA 2. We set up two instances of Windows Server 2008 (staging and production), and will be using our existing database server (SQL Server 2008).
None of us really have much experience in ASP.net itself, though we are all very comfortable in C# and the MVC pattern. The coding itself isn't much of an issue; but the deployment process is. Our goal is to be able to have a CI setup that will automatically pull down, and test, our applications into staging on commit - then have the option to tag, then switch, the checkouts on our production sites when websites pass QA.
Some of the things I'm having issues with here is the concept of an ASP.net application and how it integrates into SVN. CF, like PHP or RoR, are all scripting languages and as such require no build process (checking out the source into production is very straightforward). But in this case, applications need to be compiled - which is where we start to have problems. Will we need to create another server (or use an existing one) that has some sort of application that pulls down code, compiles it, then somehow pushes it on the live servers? If so, what is considered the best way to accomplish this? I imagine if we end up using a build tool such as Nant, adding additional steps to migrate the database would be trivial, but what is the best way to accomplish this as well?
Another, slightly unrelated, problem is how our designers will work with our code. Most of them are on Macs, and using VS isn't much of an option. How will they be able to edit the aspx, css and image files easily? Our goal is to make this as transparent as possible to them.
We have done a lot of shopping around, and ASP.net MVC seems to be the best option as far as our familiarity with the language, and our current platform. We just need to figure out a good build process so everything is as transparent as possible. I understand there are a ton of resources available on this, but I wanted to get the opinions of the people here from first-hand experience.
Microsoft TFS has a wonderful build solution built-in. It's costly, but effective. In addition, you cannot lose by looking at CruiseControl, which is free. TeamCity from JetBrains is also a great option. All of these Continuous Build and Integration solutions would provide a good starting point for your research.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/dd408382.aspx
http://www.cruisecontrol.com/
http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/
Even Draco.net is a good consideration:
http://draconet.sourceforge.net/
We use http://www.cruisecontrol.com/ (CC) running on our SVN / Build server. You can configure CC via it's own config/script files to pull down the latest source from SVN and then spawn one or more Nant or MSBuild scripts which can perform your build and deployment.
We script all of our database changes into change scripts which also go into SVN. We then have a custom command line tool which will deploy the change scripts to SQL Server during the web site deployment. All of that is done in the Nant script.
So each project's Nant script handles the build, web site deployment and SQL change script deployment.
The tricky part is handling rollbacks if/when something goes horribly wrong. I would suggest posting another question for that specific problem.
I would appreciate any advice regarding tools and practices I could use to confirm my recently completed website is performing correctly.
Although I am confident the code is not producing errors and is functionally operating as it should, I have little understanding of how to identify IIS, SQL Server and Windows performance/concurrency issues. For example if the website was briefly hit by a huge deluge of traffic, how would I be aware that event had ever happened and how would I know whether the website coped with it.
The website was written using ASP.NET 2.0 and C# running on Windows 2003 R2 Standard Edition, SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition and IIS 6.
Consider using a logging mechanism that also raises alerts, so when a database call takes too long, indicating a high server load, the logger raises a warning. Check out log4net.
Regarding tools and practises, I recommend badboy and jmeter as tools for load testing your site. Badboy is simple and can generate urls that may also be used in jmeter. The latter does a very good job load testing your site. Do tests that run over a long period and use different hardware setups to see how adding more web/app servers affect performance.
Also, check out PerfMon, a tool that lets you monitor a local or remote Windows server regarding contention rate, cpu load and so on.
You can use a load generating tool like WebLoad to capture and then replay (with possible variations through scripting) user interactions with your application's UI with lots of threads and connections.
As mentioned, load generation tools are quite helpful. One thing you can add for the database side is to use SQL Tracing. Setup a test plan with very specific steps, and as you step through your plan, trace the SQL that is running on the server.
This way, you can identify if certain actions are causing unnecessary/duplicate database calls. Also, you may discover very large and non-performant queries being run for very simple actions.
For SQL Server use the sys.dm_exec_requests DMV and check for CPU usage, reads, writes, blocking etc etc
select blocking_session_id,wait_type,*
from sys.dm_exec_requests