Azure storage: staging vs . production

Question

I want to maintain a staging as well as a production environment in azure. Each should have it\'s own blob storage and sql storage. What wod be the best way to achive this? setu

Answer 1

Here is a step by step guide.

1) You need the library: Microsoft.Samples.WindowsAzure.ServiceManagement There is a nuGet package entitled "Windows Azure Service Management Library" which contains this.

2) You need create a X509Certificate2 and follow the instructions laid out here. Make sure you upload the .CER file you create to the Subscription Certificate store. Make sure you upload a copy of the .PFX with the PRIVATE KEY to the actual cloud service certificate store.

Create and upload a certificate for Windows Azure Management

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/clouddeployments/archive/2010/05/12/making-calls-to-the-service-management-api-from-a-service-running-in-windows-azure.aspx

3) These tutorials also gloss over this: you need to have the service endpoint defined. I did that in my app.config file with the following

4) Once that is done, I created a static class named "GetServerInstance". Here is the code:

public static class GetServerInstance
  {
      const string SubId = "your azuresubscriptionid";        

    public static bool IsProductionEnvironment()
    {
        //get the current deploymentId
        var currentInstance = RoleEnvironment.DeploymentId;  
        var mgmtChannnel = ServiceManagementHelper.CreateServiceManagementChannel("WindowsAzureEndPoint",GetCertifcate()); //make the endpoint.  
        var serviceDetails = mgmtChannnel.GetHostedServiceWithDetails(SubId, "your-cloud-service-name", true);
        var currentDeploymentSlot = serviceDetails.Deployments.First(p => p.PrivateID == currentInstance).DeploymentSlot;

        if (currentDeploymentSlot == DeploymentSlotType.Staging)            
            return false; //staging server

        if (currentDeploymentSlot == DeploymentSlotType.Production)            
            return true; //production server        

    }


    private static X509Certificate2 GetCertifcate()
    {
        string certificateThumbprint = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("CertificateThumbprint");
        if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(certificateThumbprint))
        {
            return null; //I'd throw an exception here and log the error
        }

        var certificateStore = new X509Store(StoreName.My, StoreLocation.LocalMachine);
        certificateStore.Open(OpenFlags.ReadOnly);

        var certs = certificateStore.Certificates.Find(X509FindType.FindByThumbprint, certificateThumbprint, false);
        if (certs.Count != 1)
        {                
            return null; //I'd throw an exception here and log the error
        }

        return certs[0];
    }
}

5) Now in my worker role, which I never want to run on Staging, because it will charge people twice. I call this:

 if (GetServerInstance.IsProductionEnvironment())
        {
           //Do work! I'm in production
        };