Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Windows containerization efforts continue to grow and deploying workloads on a hybrid Kubernetes cluster might soon be in your future. Rancher fully supports creating and managing Windows Clusters today and we would like to show you how it could look like within your organization.

We need distributed session. Spoiler: We DON'T roll it ourselves. In-memory sessions stop working as soon as there is more than one server. Most production environments have more than one server so the session issue needs to be dealt with. There are two options for sessions in a web farm. First, a load balancer can be used to lock each user on a specific box. This lets us continue to use in-memory sessions. The second is switching from in-memory to distributed session storage.

We've started writing code for Request Metrics. That code needs to be tested. We need a unit test framework for our .NET Core solution. We've used various frameworks on our .NET projects over the years, but enough has changed in .NET Core to require a small investigation into unit testing options. Ultimately, we settled on NUnit because of its good balance between simplicity and features.

We've finally finished screwing around with basic groundwork. Today we start writing actually useful application code! First, can we connect to Redis? Connecting to Redis implies some connection strings, so we'll create a basic environment based configuration while we're thinking about it.

Query string parsing in ASP.NET has never been pleasant. The APIs were always a little weird and had some gotchas. Well, in .NET Core, Microsoft has taken another stab at a query string parsing API. Now, remember, they've had over a decade to come up with something better.... have they managed to improve things? Let's find out.

A web application isn't much use if it isn't running. We hand in our neckbeard cards and copy+paste our way out of the problem. Last episode, we configured NGINX to act as a reverse proxy for our Asp.Net Core application. We tested our setup by manually running the .Net Core app from an SSH session. Today we'll fix that stop-gap step by running our application as a service with systemd. We'll add the new service by running a few tasks in Ansible.

ASP.NET Core applications have a built-in webserver called Kestrel. This internal webserver is not intended to serve requests directly. It must be placed behind a production quality webserver such as NGINX or IIS. We use Ansible to provision NGINX on our Linux server.

An introduction to how to install elmah.io in your.NET web project.