From the previous blog post Part 2, I have created a batch account, deployed my .NET console application as an Application Package and created a Batch Pool of nodes. In this blog post, I will run a simple job against this batch pool.

A job is a collection of one or more tasks. It manages how computation is performed by its tasks on the compute nodes in a pool.

To read more about jobs, go to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/batch/batch-api-basics#job

I will show how to create and configure a job to run my deployed .NET console application.

Click on Jobs blade

Click on Add
Set the Pool to the pool just created
Configure the Job manage task so that it runs the .NET console application.
The command line in my case was in the format

cmd /c %AZ_BATCH_APP_PACKAGE_<Package Name>%\\<app name>.exe -args {set of command line arguments}

Click Select and then Ok

By clicking into the created job, you can see the task has been created for execution.

By clicking into the batch pool, you can see one running node that is executing the job’s task

Upon the one task completion, the state is completed

In the list of jobs, you can see the job has been completed

As a result, you can see some the files being stored in my Azure Data Lake Store. My .NET console application is implemented to store data into this Azure Data Lake Store.

If there are no further jobs to create, I will save on compute costs by deleting the batch pool. Note that you can go to each individual node and click disable but this won’t save on compute costs as the VM is not deallocated. By disabling, the node is not online to task scheduling.

Conclusion

I have shown how to deploy a .NET console application, create a pool of VMs and run a job to execute the .NET console application. As a result, it only ran against one node. Then what about taking advantage of the rest of the nodes? A job has the capability to run many tasks in parallel whereby using many or all the nodes in the pool. My next blog article will demonstrate parallel task execution.

Next: Azure Batch for Internet Data Collection Part 4: ParallelTask Execution