Running Go on Azure Web Sites | Hacker News Reader

Running Go on Azure Web Sites

wadewegner.com

32 pointsmrry4 comments

Azure websites are well priced and have a great UI. But holy heck are they annoying as heck to get anything running on.

I tried to port over some existing PHP software, then utilise an Azure MS SQL database. However it appears that an Azure MS SQL connection requires a completely different PHP extension than a normal MS SQL instance, and while Microsoft themselves have produced one[1] as well as others, I never did get it to work.

I literally spend three solid days trying to get PHP talking to Azure MS SQL. Never did quite get it to work, it took me almost a whole day just to figure out how to install PHP extensions (hint: you have to copy the right type of extension binary into two locations, then reference it in the web-UI as shown[0], if you upload any of the wrong type of binary then nothing loads).

I guess ultimately it was still a "win" for Microsoft as I finally gave up and purchased a much more expensive VPS instead (A0 Basic). $14 Vs. $9. With the VPS I was able to get the whole thing up and running in under an hour Vs. 3 days wasted with Azure websites with no substantial results.

PS - Why haven't the Azure websites team gone through the most popular software on the internet and written guides e.g. Wordpress, Drupal, PHPBB, Magento, etc.

[0] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-...

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2009...

We've been looking at Azure and other services like Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk and truly the one thing that would make it all easier to explore is a solid guide for common software.

Great, I've got an instance running! How do I handle DB setup? What about app/media storage? How do we add SSL?

You can generally work your way through adding the necessary systems to the stack and gluing things together but an official guide or two would be invaluable and give me the feeling that I'm doing things The Right Way.

FWIW: This is exactly why places like Heroku are in business. They handle these sorts of details for people who aren't comfortable or able to do it for themselves.

Remember that PaaS != IaaS. Also, Redhat's openshift isn't too bad and you can get the code running on your own hardware, so ++.

I love Azure if you're working with the MS stack. I'm assuming its by design though. I can one click deploy with Visual Studio, which is pretty awesome.

I do however, have the same issue. What if I'm not working in the MS stack? What about deploying a NodeJS app or just some basic PHP or Ruby site? Even their very high level tutorials have issues, which you see in the comments. No one has really put together decent documentation on how to do work that isn't directly related the MS stack.

I honestly thought they would have better documentation by now, but maybe I'm just being too optimistic?

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