Skip to main content

Windows Azure AppFabric July Release

This week Microsoft released several updates and enhancements to the Windows Azure AppFabric Management Portal and the Access Control service.

An overview:

  • Management Portal
    • Localization: the Windows Azure Platform Management Portal now supports the following extra languages: Japanese, German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese.
    • Co-admin support:  Co-administrators have finally access to the AppFabric section of the portal.
    • Context Menus:the Portal now supports right click menus in the “Hosted Services, Storage & CDN” pane.
    • Performance Improvements: Users can expect to see significantly lower initial load times with the addition of a local temporary cache and the optimization of network bandwidth consumption.
    • Enhanced Delete Deployment: Developers can now delete running deployments. In earlier versions, developers had to wait for a deployment to stop before it could be deleted.
  • Access Control
    • Claim rules: The ACS 2.0 rules engine now supports a new type of rule that allows up to two input claims to be configured, instead of only one input claim. Rules with two input claims can be used to reduce the overall number of rules required to perform complex user authorization functions.
    • Encoding is now UTF-8 for all OAuth 2.0 responses
    • Quotas Removed:  The previous quotas on configuration data have been removed. This includes removal of all limitations on the number of identity providers, relying party applications, rule groups, rules, service identities, claim types, delegation records, issuers, keys, and addresses that can be created in a given ACS namespace.

More information:

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...
Read more

A complex system designed from scratch never works

A few years ago, I worked as an architect on a big mainframe rewrite. I still count it as one of my failures. Not because the technology was wrong, but because I couldn't convince the management team to simplify the approach. Years later, the organization is still struggling to get the new system up and running. I left the project at the time, because I couldn't put my name behind an approach that would take very long and cost a lot of money without a working system to show for it along the way. Gall’s Law That memory keeps coming back to me, because it's a textbook case of Gall's Law playing out in real life. Gall's Law , from John Gall's Systemantics , states it plainly: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works, and it cannot be patched to make it work. You have to start over with a simple system that works. What does that mean in practice,...
Read more