(Part 3) Open Source + Microsoft Azure - Building a web app using Node.js and Azure

Join Wade and Steve each week as they cover the Windows Azure Platform. You can follow and interact with the show at @CloudCoverShow.
In this episode, Nathan Totten—Technical Evangelist for Windows Azure—talks to Steve about using the Windows Azure Accelerator for Web Roles to quickly and easily deploy one or more websites across multiple Web Role instances using Web Deploy. When using this accelerator with Web Deploy, deployments only take about 30 seconds and are durably stored in Windows Azure storage.
In the news:
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You guys do a great show - I (we) really enjoy it, and it is obvoius you all have a good time doing it.
Just a correction - Wade's video was done in 1994, so he was probably 15. That makes it pre-Claw. lol
Keep up the good work!
Dad
Okay, so maybe I was slightly off when I said Wade was in his twenties.
Thanks for sharing the video!
This is a pretty cool, but aren't you charged for having this WAAWR application constantly deployed? It seems like a waste of a compute instance for something that won't be used all that often.
Edit: I watched a little bit further, and I think I have a better understanding of this. Does (or could) the WAAWR web application share the same web role instance with all the websites that it manages and deploys?
@cbae:Right, you'll pay the entire time, but the idea is that this makes it easier to put lots of websites into the same web role but easily deploy and change them individually.
This is what Ive been looking for.
Sucked how it took ages every time you had to deploy a role in Azure
Still have issues around setting up DNS for all the websites. Any pointers?
Hi is it possible to set up the Web Roll Accelerator to run over HTTPS, given that the Portal can create and destroy sites I'd want to protect the logon to HTTPS.
Similarly the deployment of web sites where we supply the Remote Desktop credentials, does this require securing?
@JimSkim You can run the accelerator over HTTPS. You would just configure SSL like any regular web role. You may want to put the admin portal on a port other than 443 though otherwise you will not be able to use a different cert for any host sites on the accelerator. The other option is to use a cert with multiple domains.
You should also use SSL when doing webdeploy to secure your credentials as well. This should work by default.
@ntotten:Thanks for the quick response, I'm fairly new to Azure, I'll go and watch Episode 15, should that pretty much cover it?
Can you elaborate or do a session on SSL? How would be upload a cert that can secure multiple websites? How do we create an appropriate wildcard cert?
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