Generating a docs website powered by Git & Markdown

Introduction

Did you know I’m a huge fan of the Microsoft / Azure docs? Did you also know that the docs websites are powered by GitHub repositories? Let that one sink in… So you can leverage the same way you collaborate on code, work on publishing documentation?!? How awesome is that!

After a bit of looking around, it appears DocFX is actually powered to do this. I don’t know if this is the tool used behind the docs website. Though there seem to be a lot of similarities. Anyhow, today’s post will be a quick walkthrough on how to setup DocFX with VSTS to publish your GitHub driven repo to an Azure Web App.

 

So what will we be needing?

Ingredients

• GitHub repository
• VSTS Account
• Azure App Service
• A tool to do the conversion : DocFX
• Chocolatey to install DocFX

 

Initialize the repository

Be sure to install DocFX on your dev station to initialize the repository. This is done by running “docfx init -q” inside of your repository.

 

Afterwards do your typical Git magic to sync your local version with GitHub (or equivalent). Now you’ll have a dummy skeleton ready for usage, and you can now structure it to your liking! My effort is going into making docs for VMchooser.

Taking a look at Azure Service Endpoints

Introduction

The concept of Service Endpoints has been around for a while now. Though for today’s post I would like to guide you through the typical process. Here we’ll take a glance of how they work and so that you know what to expect.

 

Scenario

For this post we’ll be connecting the Azure PostgreSQL Service to a VNET by leveraging a Service Endpoint. Afterwards we’ll make a connection from a VM within that VNET, and see what route is being taken!

Drupal on Azure – Leveraging the Linux App Service for a Managed Platform Experience

Introduction

WordPress is probably the most popular CMS around. Though when I look at my home country, then I see a lot of Drupal deployments too. This might be due to the fact that the creation is of Belgian origin? Though for the region I live in, Drupal is amongst the most popular CMS systems.

That being said, Drupal is a very resource hungry system. When you enable the WebProfiler (part of the Devel module), then you can see that typical page will execute between 90 and 200 database queries. This puts a lot of stress on the underlying database system, but also on the local file system.

Due to this we see a lot of articles on how to improve the performance of Drupal. Most commonly seen is the implementation of ;

• Varnish on the front end side, as a web application accelerator / caching HTTP reverse proxy
• Redis or Memcache, as a way to cache data (in memory instead of hammering the database)

For today’s post, we’ll briefly discuss the various options and afterwards delve into a more advanced scenario where we leverage the Azure Linux App Service’s multi container capability.

 

What options do I have for running Drupal on Azure?

In essence there are various ways to run Drupal on Azure ;