Moving 17 years of old legacy code and websites into the Cloud - Scott Hanselman at NDC Porto 2022

Scott Hanselman has been blogging for 20 years and podcasting for 16 and largely on legacy hardware and operating systems. All of the stuff he’s been doing on the side and like many companies he's created a lot of technical debt. He discovered something very concerning about his hosting provider and decided to move into the cloud.

This technical talk will discuss the requirements analysis, and dozens of decision points that need to be made to move this into a sustainable future. We will discuss the complexities of moving legacy systems into the cloud, considering operating systems, platforms, open source code, testing, DevOps, and much more.

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[gcmaudio]

Absolutely loved this talk, the hour just flew by. I love your presenting style, relaxed and with humour. It helps the lessons stick in mind more. Keep up the great work 👍

[boylejm]

Listening to this (again!) while setting up my first blog. Been programming for just over 25 years but since I wasn't an "official" software engineer I didn't really think I had much worth saying. But listening to your videos and talks has really clarified things for me. Thanks!

[DefriaManda]

Scott! Why you doing this to me. I just watch this on the NDC channel two days ago, now I have to watch again on your channel. Alriiight, on it. Great talk and what a fun way to teach in story mode.

[MasonWiseman]

Great talk as always Scott! I'm currently on my journey to become a cloud focused developer and this just cemented for me that it's the right call for sure. Thanks again!

[HaunaniPao]

Wow! Thank you Scott, I am taking a web dev course right now (mostly JS, but html and css) and learning to Github and making pages of blog thoughts. And this was great to realise how much I get to learn as I grow these skills. I learned so much, and I appreciate the mana you shared. cheers!

[neyandeva]

What a great talk. Never noticed a hour passed by. Thanks for sharing your experiences Scott. Lot of learnings and as usual always inspiring.

[davenrosenbaum]

You were already in the cloud the whole time. “The cloud is just someone else’s computer.” That other computer just happened to be underneath someone’s desk.

[diggee]

Thank you so much for your nod to diversify in Tech at the beginning of this presentation. It is so important.

[lanishx]

Scott is a really great speaker, really adept at communicating technical content in a easily digestible way.

[SpencerBull]

Awesome talk! I loved the storytelling and clear walkthrough on different ways of thinking to simplify what you actually needed to do. Tools are king.

[aj_aka_alan]

I’ve always enjoyed your approach to things like this Scott.

[chrismalingshu]

this is the coolest talk I ever thanks Scott for this sharing. your laptop setup is cool. esp. the terminal. seems everything is customized.

[berkpwn]

Awesome talk... things have become overcomplicated nowadays. Why do we need to complicate everything? Good developers admire simplicity. Simplicity should always be the goal, you save money and brain power to use on other projects. Really appreciate the work you do Scott!

[woutervanderharg]

Hi Scott, great to see we did similar: I've also just migrated a 17 year old dynamic website to cloud. I choose to also put the dynamic pages behind CDN because the number of parameter combinations is limited (in my case only about 25, 000 combinations). And because CDN uses H2 and TLSv1.3 with Quic (no spelling mistake), the images can be hosted on the same subdomain as the html, css and JavaScript (www. and top level domain), and be equally fast. Due to multicast and http/2 push in these protocols. Even less delays because there are less TLS handshakes (due Quic and less sub-domains), less DNS lookups (due hosting on a single sub-domain) and less requests (due to multicast).
This strategy might work in your set-up as well and might offload your machine even more :-)

I've migrated the SQL database tables to Apache parquet format on Blob storage for live queries via the object select API from a serverless function called by CDN, that then caches the result.
So even SQL based websites can be migrated without the need of a costly SQL server.

I've also added a DNS CAA record so that the client won't accept a certificate from another certificate authority, that result in that no other (thus malicious) certificate will be accepted by the browser of my visitors.

The transformation logic (to html page) now runs in a Function too (triggered by CDN) so no server is even needed.

Since I use live queries I use strict input validations on all parameters, via edge functions as well, so all input that is accepted for 'processing' or SQL query is clean and as expected.

[komit]

Scott, please I have a question, we did a project in our company for a client 12 years ago at .det framework 4 (legacy) in visual studio 2010. Now the client needs more features and we can't run the project on VS 2022, neither 19. It crashes. Any tips on what to do? Is it feasible to remake it on .net core?

Thanks for your time! We love your videos.

[TheStevenWhiting]

Used to love Mark Russinovich Case of the Unexplained talks that he sadly no longer does. Also loved Aaron Margosis talks when he still worked at Microsoft but he said he sadly stopped when Mark stopped. Now Scott joins the list of create speakers.

[TheStevenWhiting]

I'm now wondering if this would be cheaper than paying for my hosting, yearly.

[michaelwplde]

Talescale not bad... 'mostly free' for one user a few devices and more (RTFP). But more costly for more users and such. There is also Hamachi, which works pretty well to mesh disparately networked machines together, but the pricing is a bit different, I think.

[TheStevenWhiting]

Can you do the same with Wordpress? I like Wordpress but pay for hosting and its loaded into cpanel. I'm just wondering if this will be cheaper than my hosting which is about £79 a year. Maybe I could learn more Azure if I used this method instead.

[magedragheb]

in Arabic we have "سرب": a "flock" of birds, "قطيع": a "herd" of cattle