2012-08-11

.NET Web App in the Clouds

There are several ways to run Microsoft .NET web apps in the clouds. I created a “Hello World” ASP.NET MVC 4 app and deployed it to three of them today:

  1. Amazon Web Services  (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk
  2. Windows Azure Web Sites
  3. AppHarbor

The websites are currently deployed at these locations, but probably not for long:

  1. http://ct2012q3.elasticbeanstalk.com/
  2. http://ct2012q3.azurewebsites.net/
  3. http://2012q3.apphb.com/

I published to the first two directly from Visual Studio 2012 RC after installing the AWS Toolkit and the Azure SDK. For AppHarbor, I connected it to my blog2012q3 GitHub repository. It deploys each time I do a commit. To manage the apps:

  1. https://console.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
  2. https://manage.windowsazure.com/
  3. https://appharbor.com/applications

I’ve used Amazon S3 and EC2 for several years and it is no surprise that Elastic Beanstalk is my favorite so far. I really like being able to limit the IP address ranges using the security groups. I’m glad there are several options for hosting .NET web apps in the cloud and I’m looking forward to trying their differentiating features.

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