I am happy to announce that I have joined Azure Linux Team today. After working on the Azure Fabric Controller (which manages datacenters, host machines, allocations, service healing and so many of the complicated things in Azure cloud) for 2 years, I have decided to pursue opportunities in open source. Initially, I will be working on Docker, which I already have been working with for my 20%-time side projects at Microsoft. Read More →

I recently needed to secure my Docker host instance simply with a basic username and password authentication as I mostly find the certificate creation steps tedious. Docker has no built-in username/password authentication support so I thought I could have a HTTP proxy server which asks for a password on top of Docker Remote API server. Below you will find how you can secure your Docker host using username and password, namely HTTP Basic Authentication. Read More →

I am proud to announce my latest work: Docker.DotNet. It is a .NET library to interact with Docker API programmatically in C#/VB.NET applications. Using this library, you can command your docker instance to pull images, create containers, stop containers and many other things available in the Docker Remote API. The story behind it is, Docker has almost no tooling on Windows at the moment and I wanted to enable developers who would like to write Docker management apps for Windows on top of Docker API. Read More →

I decided to publish slides of the talk I gave to my team at Microsoft Azure yesterday. It was a 30 minute talk introducing to Linux Containers, cgroups, Docker, CoreOS and clustering solutions in Docker ecosystem. I can tell you that my colleagues at Azure Fabric Controller were astonished by how LXC namespaces and cgroups easily can replace Hypervisors and how quickly Docker spins up new containers. I used a Linux VM in Azure to demonstrate spinning up containers running some basic commands, memcached servers and I showed how one can create Docker images by connecting the machine as well as using Dockerfiles. Read More →

This article will be about some library methods of Azure Storage .NET Client Library often misused. I have seen several cases people used these in an improper way and doing so would often introduce bugs that you wouldn’t see on day one but appear much later on –which is the most dangerous kind. The first method ListBlobsSegmentedAsync is used to list blobs (files) in a container (folder or bucket) on an Azure Cloud Storage Service account. Read More →

I recently read an article on Scott Hanselman’s blog saying “Open Source is a thankless job, we do it anyway”. This post will not be an answer to that. I will tell you when open source is not a thankless job and ways to discourage other people from getting involved in your company’s open source project. There are times you do open source for the public good and times you do it for yourself and at the same time unavoidably for the public good anyway. Read More →

Recently, Microsoft Azure has announced support for using OAuth 2.0 protocol to authenticate Service Management REST APIs. This is something promising since OAuth 2.0 is pretty much the de facto standard for authentication on the web nowadays and it’s relatively easy to understand and reproduce manually compared to OAuth 1. Although the feature is still in preview mode, it works just fine. This will be a short, proof of concept post explaining how to authenticate the APIs using OAuth 2. Read More →

Recently I have been working on an open source .NET library idea for Windows Azure. Check blobmetadb out on GitHub. blobmetadb watches your application’s requests to Azure Blob Storage (S3 of Microsoft, in case you’re not familiar) and keeps record of blobs you upload. By keeping a local database (Redis) of metadata of blobs, you can enumerate them, compute sizes of clusters very quickly. An example use case is, assume you have a Dropbox-like application in which you use Azure Blob Storage to store files uploaded by your users. Read More →