Microsoft Azure Essentials

- for developers

VAIBHAV GUJRAL

@VABGUJRAL

About Me

Vaibhav Gujral

http://vaibhavgujral.wordpress.com

Twitter: @vabgujral

GitHub: vabgujral

Skype: vaibhav.gujral

gujral.vaibhav@hotmail.com

Technical architect with 10+ years of

extensive experience in designing,

architecting, developing and delivering

enterprise class applications.

Building Azure Solutions since 2010

Full Stack Developer. Key skills include

.Net technologies, AngularJS, SQL

Getting Started

with Microsoft

Azure

• WHAT IS AZURE?

• AZURE SERVICES

• SUBSCRIPTION MANAGEMENT

• BILLING

• AZURE PORTAL

What is cloud computing?

Not new – extension to what existed before

Provides a modern alternative to the traditional on-premises datacenter

Pay-as-you-go model

All resources are accessible over network

Benefits includes - Cost, Speed, Global Scale, Productivity, Performance,

Reliability etc.

Security Concerns

Cloud Deployment Models

Cloud Service Models

What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft’s cloud computing platform

Global Presence with 38 datacenters

Seamless online portal experience

Supports public, private and hybrid cloud models

Azure supports IaaS and PaaS models – Office 365 is SaaS offering

Azure Stack is Private cloud offering which is an add-on in Windows Server 2016

Global Presence

Azure Services

Compute services This includes the Azure Virtual Machines—both Linux and Windows, Cloud Services, App Services (Web Apps, Mobile Apps, Logic Apps, API Apps, and Function Apps), Batch (for large-scale parallel and batch compute jobs), Service Fabric, and the Azure Container Service.

Data services This includes Microsoft Azure Storage (comprised of the Blob, Queue, Table, and Azure Files services), Azure SQL Database, DocumentDB, StorSimple, and the Redis Cache.

Application services This includes services that you can use to help build and operate your applications, such as Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Service Bus for connecting distributed systems, HDInsight for processing big data, Azure Scheduler, and Azure Media Services.

Network services This includes Azure features such as Virtual Networks, ExpressRoute, Azure DNS, Azure Traffic Manager, and the Azure Content Delivery Network.

Azure Services

Subscription Management

To start with - sign up for a free trial at azure.microsoft.com – 200$ free credit for one month

Activate the Azure benefits included in MSDN subscription

Check out Purchase Options at https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/purchase-options/

Check out Member Offers at https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/member-offers/

Visual Studio Dev Essentials – 300$ credit for a year – 25$ per month

Billing/Pricing

Pricing for Azure infrastructure can be estimated by using the pricing calculator found at

http://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/calculator/

Most services are offered in – Basic, Standard and Premium tiers

Each tier differ in price and performance levels

To see current usage, click the Subscriptions tile in the Dashboard of the Azure portal

Resource cost visible per resource

Helpful in managing Azure costs

Azure Portal

Build, manage, and monitor everything from simple web apps to complex cloud applications in

a single, unified console

Currently two versions –

Azure Portal - https://portal.azure.com

Classic Portal - https://manage.windowsazure

Azure Portal - Demo

Management

Tools

• AZURE MANAGEMENT TOOLS

• DEMO

Azure Management Tools - Overview

Tools to aid in the development and management of Azure solutions

Microsoft Visual Studio

Azure Powershell

Azure cross-platform command-line (CLI)

Azure SDK

Azure Management REST APIs

Feature Specific tools-

Azure SQL Database – SQL Server Management Studio

Azure Virtual Machines - Microsoft System Center, OMS, Puppet, Chef, Powershell DSC

Azure Storage – Cloud Explorer (inside VS), AzCopy, Azure Storage Explorer

Azure Service Bus – Service Bus Explorer

Azure Management - Demo

Azure

Deployment

Models

• CLASSIC MODEL (ASM)

• AZURE RESOURCE MANAGER (ARM)

• ARM VS CLASSIC MODEL

Classic Model - ASM

Azure originally provided only the classic deployment model

Each resource exists independently and cannot be grouped

Manage resources in a coordinated approach

Deploy/Delete all the resources in the correct order

Tags are not supported

Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

Resource manager provides template based repeatable deployment model for all Azure

resources

Behaves as control planes for Azure services

Within Resource Manager, resources can be grouped, deployed, managed and monitored as a

resource group

Faster than classic Azure Service Management (ASM) model

Reusable/linkable JSON template

Mark one resource dependable on another

Supports tagging of resources

Microsoft recommends all the new Azure resources should be created using ARM

Resource Groups

Under ARM, all the resources are grouped into a Resource Group

All of the resources in a resource group share the same lifecycle

A resource can only be assigned to one group at a time

A resource can be added to or removed from a resource group at any time.

Most types of resource can be moved to a different resource group at any time

The resources in a resource group can be in different regions

You can use a resource group to control access for the resources therein

Resource Providers

Offers a set of resources and operations for working with an Azure service

Microsoft.AppService

Microsoft.AzureActiveDirectory

Microsoft.Compute

Microsoft.DocumentDB

Microsoft.EventHub

Microsoft.Sql

Microsoft.Storage

….

Role based Access Control

Fine-grained control over the operations and scope with which a user can perform an action

Permissions at resource level against Co-administrators

Supported roles-

Owner

Reader

SQL DB contributor

SQL Security Manager

Storage Account Contributor

VM Contributor

Custom Roles

Supports Service Principals

Resource Manager Template

Resource Manager Template

Azure Resource Manager - Demo

Azure App

Service

• APP SERVICE

• SERVICE PLANS

• WEB APPS DEMO

• CONFIGURING, SCALING

& MONITORING WEB APPS

Azure App Service

Azure App Service

App Service Plans

An App Service plan defines the capacity and resources to be shared among one or more

app services that are assigned to that plan.

The following are some of the criteria to be considered when creating an App Service plan.

Location (such as West US)

Instance count

Pricing tier (such as Free, Standard, or Premium) providing distinct settings for a variety of performance

and service capabilities:

Number of cores or instance size

Amount of memory

Amount of storage

Maximum number of instances

Autoscaling options (depends on tier—automatic, manual, or none)

Azure Web App

Hosted in an Azure App Service

Enables deployment of web applications quickly

Supported languages include .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, and Python

Available templates includes - WordPress, Umbraco, Joomla!, and Drupal

Supports continuous deployment with Team Foundation Server (TFS), GitHub, TeamCity,

Jenkins, or BitBucket

For diagnostics, provides performance statistics, application logging, web server logging, IIS

logs, and IIS Failed Request logs.

Supports remote debugging using Visual Studio

Azure Web App - Demo

Azure Virtual

Machines

• INTRODUCTION TO AZURE VIRTUAL

MACHINES

• DEMO

Azure Virtual Machines - Overview

IaaS offering – you own the VM – though it runs on Microsoft’s datacenter

Supports Windows as well as Linux images

Supports two types of disks-

OS Disk – which holds OS and is required

Data Disk – which holds data and is optional

Ideal for workloads like Database Servers, Sharepoint servers, Identity Servers, Domain Controllers

Lift and Shift on-premise workloads/VMs to Azure

Charged hourly for the VM and storage charges for holding VHDs are extra

Three status – Running, Stopped, Stopped (Deallocated)

User powershell or CLI to stop a VM but keep it allocated

Virtual Machines - Demo

Azure Storage

• STORAGE ACCOUNTS

• Blobs

• Tables

• Queues

• Files

• DEMO

Azure Storage - Overview

Microsoft-managed service providing durable, scalable, and redundant storage

Includes following services-

Blob Storage

Table Storage

Queue Storage

File Storage

Storage Accounts

Secure account to give access to Azure Storage services

Unique namespace for storage resources

Types of storage accounts-

General-purpose storage accounts

Blob storage accounts

100 storage accounts per subscription

Each storage account has 500TB of storage limit

Shared Access Signatures

Provides controlled access to Azure storage resources

A shared access signature (SAS) is a token that can be appended to a URL that enables

delegated access to a storage resource

Anyone who possesses the token can access the resource it points to with the permissions it

specifies, for the period of time that it is valid

Two types-

Service SAS

Account SAS

Redundancy options

Protects data and preserves application up-time in the event of transient hardware failures

Replication copies data, either within the same data center, or to a second data center

Replication Types

Locally-redundant storage (LRS)

Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)

Geo-redundant storage (GRS)

Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)

Azure Blob Storage

Large amounts of unstructured object data

Highly cost-effective and scalable

Every blob is organized into a container

http://<storage account>.blob.core.windows.net/<container>/<blob>

Blob types includes-

Block blobs

Append blobs

Page blobs

Useful for storing media files like videos, audios, images

Useful for back-up

Azure Table Storage

Microsoft's NoSQL key/attribute store – schema-less design

Highly available, massively scalable storage for structured data

Collection of entities – where a collection of properties and their values comprise an entity

http://<storage account>.table.core.windows.net/<table>

Two entities in the same table can contain different collections of properties, and those

properties can be of different types

An entity always has 3 properties – PartitionKey, RowKey and TimeStamp

The combination of PartitionKey and RowKey should always be unique to serve as primary key

All entities with same partition key are stored on same storage node

RowKey denotes uniqueness within the partition

Each entity can have 252 properties or key/value pairs

Azure Table Storage

Azure Storage Queues

Reliable messaging solution for asynchronous communication

Supports managing asynchronous tasks and building process workflows

A message can be up to 64KB of size

http://<storage account>.queue.core.windows.net/<queue>

Time-to-live(TTL) for a message can be up to 7 days

Maintains all server-side logs for all the transactions against the queue

Preferable when queue size grows over 80 GB in size

Azure File Shares

Cloud-based SMB file shares

Idle for moving legacy applications to Azure that rely on file shares

A virtual machine can mount a file share just as a desktop application mounts a typical SMB

share

Based on SMB-3, it can be mounted on Windows VM across Azure regions or on-premise

Accessible over REST API anywhere

Maximum size can be up to 5 TB and each file can be of 1 TB maximum size

Multiple VMs can share same Azure File Share

Azure Storage - Demo

SQL Database

• INTRODUCTION TO SQL

DATABASE

• SQL SERVER IN A VM

• DEMO

Azure SQL Database - Overview

Managed Cloud Database as a Service

Based on SQL Server Engine

Each database in Azure SQL Database is associated with a logical server

Scale on the fly

It can be

A single database with its own set of resources (DTUs)

Part of an elastic pool that shares a set of resources (eDTUs)

Azure SQL Database – Size Chart

Azure SQL Database – Elastic Pool

Simple, cost-effective solution for managing and scaling multiple databases that have varying

and unpredictable usage demands

The databases in an elastic pool are on a single Azure SQL Database server and share a set

number of resources at a set price

Optimizes the price performance for a group of databases within a prescribed budget while

delivering performance elasticity for each database.

When to consider a pool?

Well suited for a large number of databases with low average utilization with relatively

infrequent utilization spikes

The more the number of databases added to a pool the greater are the savings

Azure SQL Database

On-premise SQL Server database need some re-engineering before migrating from on premise

to Azure SQL Database

Does not supports Windows Authentication, but supports Azure Active Directory authentication

Unsupported features includes – Always On Availaibility Groups, BACKUP, CLR, Database

Mirroring, Database Snapshots, SSIS, SSRS, SSAS, etc.

Complete list is here

Unsupported T-SQL statements includes – HAS_DBACCESS, sp_configure, EXECUTE AS LOGIN,

fn_get_sql, etc.

Complete list is here

T-SQL debugging is not supported

Differences with On-premise SQL Server

Azure SQL Database - Demo

SQL Server in a VM

Useful when SQL Database doesn’t offers the required features

Things to consider while opting for SQL server on a VM:

Pricing might includes OS license cost, SQL Server license cost

You can bring your own licenses

Pricing also includes Azure Storage cost which is used for storing VHDs

At Least DS2 VM for standard edition

At least DS3 VM for Enterprise edition

Azure will offer high availability of VM overall but not the SQL Server instance

Choose SQL Server in a VM if high level of control is desired

Also useful for lift-and-shift database migrations

Consider other databases to bring down the costs – MySQL is available on Azure

SQL Server in a VM - Demo

Q&A

References• MICROSOFT AZURE ESSENTIALS:

FUNDAMENTALS OF AZURE