Tag Archives: WebJobs

San Diego, Seattle, then Seattle; Oh My!!

by

TractorTis the season for peregrination, la de dah de dah, de dah, de dah.  For a start I’m off to a fun-filled family reunion in sweltering San Diego (in Ramona, CA, if I’m being particular; to get that gen-u-ine desert during prolonged drought experience!) followed by two back-to-back weeklong internal Microsoft conferences in Seattle.  Yes, the joys of professional development know no bounds, but if that wasn’t enough, I also get to attend a three day team offsite in Baltimore a couple of days after I get back home to Philly.

Anyway, I’m complaining overmuch because for a start (a) I love my family and (b) I’ve heard mention that this time around I get to ride my brother-in-law’s newish 1937 tractor on his “gentleman-farmer” farm, whooping it up and bellowing  my trademark “Yowza” at the top of my lungs as the barely motile beast tops an eye-watering 10mph.  To be sure, life doesn’t get any better!

Continue reading →

Handling Poison; Messages, I Mean

by

A poison message, for the uninformed, is a “queued” message that can’t be processed for one technical reason or another.  Doesn’t sound like much of a bother, but due to the way that queues operate, they can muck up the works if left unhandled.

Azure WebJobs does a decent job of handling poison messages out of the box. Basically, you’re given five tries (by default) to process a given message.  If, for instance, the database you’re trying to write to is unreachable or maybe the instructions embodied in an message were somehow malformed then the message would be automagically moved to a “poison” queue for further processing; but only after five failed attempts.  As to any further handling, it’d be up to you.

Continue reading →

I Need a [Web]Jobs

by

Once again, with the new formed buds of spring a-budding, it only natural for a young man’s thoughts turn to . . . WebJobs.  OK, probably not.  But this (not quite young!) man has a good reason to be thinking of such things: I’m giving a WebJobs presentation at Philly Code Camp 2016.1 later today.  The session will be more than a little hands-on, but I also have a smallish deck, with a number of highlights and resource links, that you can download: Batch Processing with Azure WebJobs.

For the uninitiated, WebJobs can be thought of the newish Azure tech that (most usefully!) enables workflow for the modern web.  Think image processing, shopping carts, database administration, Monte Carlo simulations, app “glue,” process control, AI, custom testing, IoT facilitation, site scraping, backups, pipelining, log ingestion and more.  Even better, WebJobs are super-simple.  You can be up and running in minutes, but more importantly, the “hard” stuff rarely takes more than hours.

If you work with the cloud: run, don’t walk.