Architect Tips

Architect Tip: What is Technical Debt? Welcome to Architect Tips presented by Clear Measure, a software architecture company. Empowering .NET development teams to be self-sufficient, able to move fast, deliver quality, and run their software systems with confidence. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube or your video podcast feed. If you have a question for the show, send them to [email protected] and the next tip could be yours! What is Technical Debt? Now we all want to move fast and deliver consistent quality and run our software in production with confidence knowing that...

Architect Tip: How Often to Deploy to Production

Architect Tips

How often should you be deploying your software to production? Welcome to architect tips. I am Jeffrey Palermo. Today we are going to talk about how often to deploy to production. If you have a question for architect tips, send it to [email protected] From those submitted, we’ll pick a question and, if I can put it into a short five-minute bite-sized chunk, I’ll do it. Otherwise, I will just send you an email and I will answer it for you. How often should you deploy to production?

Architect Tip: Testing Polymorphic EFCore Mapping

Architect Tips

Welcome to Architect Tips presented by Clear Measure, a software architecture company. Empowering .NET development teams to be self-sufficient, able to move fast, deliver quality, and run their software systems with confidence. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube or your video podcast feed. If you have a question for the show, send them to [email protected] and the next tip could be yours. Howdy! Welcome to Architect Tips. Today I want to talk about strategies for writing and maintaining automated tests for object-relational mapping whenever you have a hierarchy that you...

Private Build Structure

Architect Tips

Welcome to Architect Tips, presented by Clear Measure, a software architecture company. Empowering .NET development teams to be self-sufficient, able to move fast, deliver quality, and run their software systems with confidence. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube or your video podcast feed. If you have a question for the show, send them to [email protected] and the next tip could be yours. Hello and welcome to Architect Tips. Today, I want to talk about the essentials of a private build and a lot of people are trying to do continuous integration but they only have a...

Architect Tip: Developer vs Architect

Architect Tips

Welcome to Architect Tips presented by Clear Measure, a software architecture company. Empowering .NET development teams to be self-sufficient, able to move fast, deliver quality and run their software systems with confidence. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube or your video podcast feed. If you have a question for the show, send them to [email protected] and the next tip could be yours.What's the difference between an architect and a developer? Let's talk about that. Now, as a developer, when you're joining a team, you're shown the ropes. You have a new workstation and you're...

Architect Tip: Application Architecture Diagrams

Architect Tips

Welcome to architect tips. I am Jeffrey Palermo. And I am going to show you today how to use architecture diagrams in a really, really easy way. Now as we go through, there is a lot of resources, a lot of, interesting topics on the Azure DevOps podcast. You will want to make sure to check out that as a resource to you and on this show architect tips, I will answer your architect questions. All you have to do is tweet me @jeffreypalermo and I'll pick a question and, if I can put it into a short five-minute bite-sized chunk, I'm just going to make one of these out of it. Otherwise, I will just...

Architect Tip: Versionable Architect Diagrams

Architect Tips

In this architect tip, we’re going to be talking about Versionable Architecture Diagrams! As always here at Clear Measure, we are a software architecture company, and our goal for you is to be able to move fast, deliver quality, and run your systems with confidence! Having architecture diagrams that work for you as part of that. Now we want to have beautiful diagrams just like this one, but doing them in Visio, it just is hard. So, let's get into it. The first thing that we need to do in order to get started with these types of diagrams in this method in a versionable fashion is to install a...

Architect Tip: Blazor Circuit Tracking

Architect Tips

Architect Tip: Blazor

Architect Tips

Welcome to Architect Tips with a tip so that you can get your team to move faster, deliver quality, and run your system with confidence! We will talk about the architecture of Blazor and some of the key differences if you are running a Blazor application. Before we do that, you might wanna check out Azure DevOps Podcast; for .NET developers who are shipping software with Microsoft platform technologies; go to . Blazor is a different architecture; it is a new architecture. Blazor runs on top of .NET Core, and the server-side has been out for several months now. WebAssembly just came out in...

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Welcome to another architect tip. I am Jeffrey Palermo, your host, and we are going to be talking a little bit about a tip specific to the new Blazor framework for .NET Core. We talked to Steve Sanderson, the original inventor of the first version of Blazor on the Azure DevOps podcast recently, so you might be interested in checking that out. What we are going to do here is talk about how to track your circuits and how to know how many people are using your application and your distribution. This one is going to be specific to a tip specific to the server side because your client running in JavaScript is the same and it is going to be running in a browser. Then the Razor components are going to stream over web sockets, the changes to your screen. As you look at your development tools in your browser, you are going to see a bunch of binary messages going across. Those are the actual changes to your screen and that is the communication.

Now, if you're running in Azure and you are running with multiple instances and you have some custom auto scaling rules, which you're going to want to do, and you're going to want to custom auto scale. Then you are going to have the question, how many of the users are tied or how many of the connected circuits are tied to each of the web servers? Because you are going to be using sticky sessions. That is the ARR Affinity as Azure calls it. And, so once a user gets assigned by the load balancer to a particular web server instance in your app service plan, it is going to stay there for the life of the session, which is the circuit. So, you are going to want to know, okay, how many what is my distribution?

Do I have one that is overloaded? If you have scaled up, that does not necessarily cause the user sessions to be more evenly distributed. Once a user is assigned to an instance it is there. You can scale up after the fact, but that is only going to affect new users that come in after you have scaled up.

If the original instances are already overloaded, they are going to remain overloaded unless you do something to specifically force the closure of those circuits, and then you can have the auto retry logic. So, what you are going to want is to graph in your dashboard and application insights.

That looks a little bit like this and, on the top right you can see average open circuits and then bottom left, you can see the average connected circuits, and, on the bottom, right is how many circuits have disconnected over time. Then it is often also good to track them memory of each of the instances of your application.

We can see that on the top left in this example, and you do not get this out of the box. You are going to need to emit some custom metrics, to application insights. I'm going to show you how to do that with Blazor server side and as I go over to visual studio, just to show you that there is a class in Blazor called circuit handler, and you can find it in Microsoft.ASPNetCore.components.server.circuits.circuithandler. In .NET 5, that is going to be really easy to find a refactored with .NET 3.1.8 you are going to find that in the components.server.web assembly nuget package. You are going to have to grab the WebAssembly nuget package to get something specific to, Blazor server side, but that is where it is. You're going to inherit your own class from this, register it in your services collection, and you can do with it, whatever you want, because you're going to get events for circuit up and down.

Look at what we've done here, we've created the names of the different events and we've created a dictionary for open circuits and then a timer so that we don't, we don't emit this metric every single time it fires. Then the events that you get are circuit opened and circuit closed.

Look at that with circuit open, it is going to be called for us by the framework. In our dictionary, this circuit is open using a dictionary. We make sure that we do not have duplicates. Whereas we found in real practice that these events, get called and fired, not completely synchronous.

You will want to use some type of hashing, mapping or dictionary, deduplication, but just using a dictionary works just fine. So open circuits, that is our logic there. You could use a simple int counter, whatever logic you want. You get the opportunity to do something when the circuit opens and when the circuit closes. You also get events that are correlated on connection up and on connection down.

We do the same thing with the dictionary, on those things. So that is your tip. That is your architect tip for, Blazor server-side connection tracking. It is going to be important as you get your applications into production, to know how many open circuits you have per web instance and what your traffic is overall.

So, I hope you enjoyed this architect tip, and we will see you next time.

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