A Serverless Maintenance Website with S3 and CloudFront

A common way to put a website into 'maintenance mode' is to have another, separate, website whose only purpose is to return an informative message along with a HTTP Service Unavailable (503) response code, regardless of the request sent to it. This way, if a site becomes unavailable,…

Zero Downtime Deploys with Entity Framework Migrations

At Moneybox, we've implemented a continuous delivery pipeline using TeamCity, Octopus Deploy and Azure WebApps. Taking this a bit further, by making use of the deployment slot functionality of Azure WebApps, we were able to implement one click, zero downtime deployments with minimal effort. In summary, this works…

Reverting Azure Sql Databases

Once in a while, you may find that you need to roll your Azure Sql Database back to a previous state. Unfortunately, even though Azure takes care of backups for you, there isn't a lot of information on how to restore a database to an earlier state. For…