We use New Relic for Application Performance Monitoring on our ASP.NET and node.js applications. Recently, we’ve started moving our infrastructure from on-premise into Amazon Web Services (AWS). Because we’re just beginners, we started out with the Elastic Beanstalk service, which allows us to easily deploy new versions of our applications backed by a decent infrastructure. In an on-premise situation, we’d manually install the .NET Agent and the Infrastructure Agent. But working with Elastic Beanstalk means we need to take a different approach to keep things efficient and consistent.…

Last week, my company published the public preview of MomCharts.com, our baby tracking software in the cloud. One of the design goals for the software was make sure it was cross-platform, cross-device, and as maintenance free as possible. My company (Heavy Code) is a member of the BizSpark program by Microsoft so we’ve got access to top tier tools and, most importantly, Windows Azure, at no cost to us. Pieces of Azure In Use There are a number of Azure services MomCharts runs.…

We’re all programmers, right? We want to constantly improve our software and make the right choices about what to build. Since we’re all good engineers, however, sometimes it’s time to cut features. How will that impact the users? Do we even know if the users use a specific feature? One way is to remove the feature and see who complains. But there’s a better way. Telemetry Telemetry lets us watch what the users are doing without standing over their shoulder.…