Getting SaaSy with PaaSy Azure Meetup Recap

Last night's MKE Azure meetup at Centare was a great success!  Thanks to everyone who decided to skip (or defer) the presidental debate and join us.  And a Big thanks to Chris Wilson @ Northwoods Software for the effort into creating and presenting most of the technical aspects of iMoneza (soon to named be Wallit)!  Here are the final slides that were used for the presentation.

MKE Azure Meetup 10/19/2016 - Focusing on iMoneza PaaS on Azure

On Wednesday, October 18th at 6:30PM, I will be hosting and presenting at the MKE Azure Meetup.  The topic we're covering will be the iMoneza SaaS comprehensive paywall developed entirely on PaaS in Azure. Chris Wilson, our lead architect from Northwoods Software will be presenting on the technical aspects.   Please join us if you can.  As a co-founder of MKE Azure group, and VP of IT at iMoneza, I'm doubly excited!

Details Here

A slide presentation will be available after the presentation.

New Build and Deploy Automation

Our software build and deployment process was taking too long to execute (about 90 minutes to QA). Even though this process was scripted, it took a fair amount of manual intervention, and prevented us from deploying our software to QA as often as we wished. We took a pause from our regular sprint schedule, and dedicated a week to improve this process. After we diagrammed our existing workflow, and identified the "low hanging fruit", we determined that we first needed to look at at a build server or service. We were hoping to fully automate this solution, and bring our deployment process under 30 minutes (ideally with little to no human interaction).

As a .net environment, and a user of Bitbucket (using Mercurial), we intended to take a look at both Atlassian's Bamboo, and TFS build and deploy services using visualstudio.com. After quickly doing a little research on build services, I found this article by Scott Hanselman. Though this post was nearly two years old, we thought Appveyor was worth a look, while continuing to research competitive solutions. We soon realized that our existing Powershell scripts could be used with little modifications, AND this service didn't require us to support a server (I love PaaS). Compared to other solutions, we felt that Appveyor met all our needs, was very quick to implement, and at $60/month - seemed like a great fit.

You can probably imagine how this story ends - we really like the Appveyor solution. Upon a source control commit (from Bitbucket), a build and deploy is automatically triggered, and this unattended process takes approx 10-20 minutes - exceeding our 30 minute deploy goal, and with it being entirely automatic - exceeded our expectations by requiring virtually no man-hours.

Kudos to you Appveyor for making this a pretty easy transition with enormous benefits
(No, I'm not a product spokesperson)