Today, let’s take a colloquial look at automatically granting ingress access to your Elastic Beanstalk apps that need to use RDS resources. When we first started, we brought up our RDS instance and our Elastic Beanstalk instance. The two weren’t connected. Of course, as soon as the instance tried to connect to the SQL Server, it couldn’t. Why? Because the RDS security group blocks all access by default, only allowing in what you specify.…

Turns out, AWS security groups secure your stuff, even if you don’t know it. At my employer, we finally got access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Vinyl Deals runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite the fact that I’ve written articles about AWS before, my familiarity with modern AWS is still in the beginning phase. On day one playing with our shiny new AWS tools, I set up a development SQL Server using RDS.…

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.…

I’ve spent the last couple days moving a project from MVC 4 RC to MVC 4 RTM. It’s gone well, but I encountered a couple trouble spots related to MVC 4 authentication and membership that I want to share. Starting Point I’m using a MVC 4 application that was created pre-RTM, so I’m working through some pain that won’t cause trouble for people creating new MVC 4 applications. Microsoft provides some information on how to upgrade a project from MVC 3 to MVC 4 on their website.…

Why would you want to upgrade to SQL Server 2012? Sure, if you’re using an older version of SQL Server, there’s many big deal reasons to justify pulling out the checkbook. Sometimes, though, it’s the little niceties that get me excited. These five features promise to eliminate hours of work you’ve no doubt spent on database queries in the past to help get your next project online quicker and make your day just a little nicer.…

Recently, I went over how to setup SQL Server on Amazon RDS from within Visual Studio. In that article, I noted that there are differences between SQL Azure and SQL Server on Amazon RDS and that we needed more work to thoroughly investigate any limitations of SQL Server on RDS. I specifically called out the ability to run .NET assemblies (otherwise known as SQLCLR) as a possible deal breaker for some.…

In the past, if you were a SQL Server shop and wanted to use the Amazon AWS cloud, your only option was to bring up Windows Virtual Machine instances and run those machines just like your on premises machines. With the new Amazon RDS SQL Server options, developers and IT shops can now spin up standalone SQL Server databases without having to worry about the machines that are hosting those databases.…