Combine Your Hats

I’m responsible for our organization’s public facing websites, which involves everything from the web stack to the business logic to the presentation. That equates to wearing a lot of hats.

Traditionally, I had conducted much of my cloud hosting business on Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is amazingly robust, yet I felt like I still needed to wear my Net/DevOps hats more often than necessary. Periodically, I would have to make sure my OS/App patches were up to date (both Windows and SQL). I would have to set up my IIS and install the missing modules from time to time (URL Rewriting, etc). Often I would have to deal with the fact that my hard drive is about full.

All I really wanted to do was code and make something cool. The drain of the menial tasks that came with being a server admin took away from the coding time. When Azure Websites became an option, I could finally get rid of the NetOps hat and reduce the size of my DevOps footprint.

Now I am deploying directly from GitHub without the cost and management of a VM or build agents (TeamCity, Octopus Deploy).

My tip here is to leverage the modern hosting solutions to free up your time to do more application development. If you can, use Azure Websites or Umbraco as a Service (UaaS).

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