Book Image

Implementing Azure: Putting Modern DevOps to Use

By : Florian Klaffenbach, Oliver Michalski, Markus Klein, Mohamed Waly, Namit Tanasseri, Rahul Rai
Book Image

Implementing Azure: Putting Modern DevOps to Use

By: Florian Klaffenbach, Oliver Michalski, Markus Klein, Mohamed Waly, Namit Tanasseri, Rahul Rai

Overview of this book

This Learning Path helps you understand microservices architecture and leverage various services of Microsoft Azure Service Fabric to build, deploy, and maintain highly scalable enterprise-grade applications. You will learn to select an appropriate Azure backend structure for your solutions and work with its toolkit and managed apps to share your solutions with its service catalog. As you progress through the Learning Path, you will study Azure Cloud Services, Azure-managed Kubernetes, and Azure Container Services deployment techniques. To apply all that you’ve understood, you will build an end-to-end Azure system in scalable, decoupled tiers for an industrial bakery with three business domains. Toward the end of this Learning Path, you will build another scalable architecture using Azure Service Bus topics to send orders between decoupled business domains with scalable worker roles processing these orders. By the end of this Learning Path, you will be comfortable in using development, deployment, and maintenance processes to build robust cloud solutions on Azure. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Learn Microsoft Azure by Mohamed Wali • Implementing Azure Solutions - Second Edition by Florian Klaffenbach, Oliver Michalski, Markus Klein • Microservices with Azure by Namit Tanasseri and Rahul Rai
Table of Contents (29 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Microsoft Azure


When Windows Azure came online for the general public in February 2010, there were only database services, websites, and virtual machine hosting available. Over time, Microsoft constantly added features and new services to Azure, and, as there were more and more offerings for Linux and other non-Windows services, Microsoft decided in April 2014 to rename Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure. This supported Microsoft's commitment to transform itself into a services company, which means that, in order to be successful, you have to offer as many services as possible to as many clients as possible. Since then, Microsoft has constantly improved and released new services. Additionally, it constantly builds and expands data centers all over the world.

Note

Service updates happen very frequently. That is the reason why you need to keep yourself informed. For example, the database offering you are using could have improved storage or performance capabilities. Information sources are the official Microsoft Azure blog and the Azure Twitter channel. Furthermore, information can be found on the websites of several Azure MVPs.

 

Azure services overview

Azure offers many services in its cloud computing platform. These services include the following:

The service categories, differentiated between platform services and infrastructure services.

The platform services are as follows: 

  • Management: These services include the management portal, the marketplace with the services gallery, and the components to automate things in Azure.
  • Compute services: Compute services are Azure cloud services that are basically PaaS offerings for developers to quickly build and deploy highly scalable applications. The service fabric and Azure RemoteApp are also in this category.
  • Security: This contains all of the services that provide identity in Azure, such as Azure AD, multi-factor authentication, and the key vault, which is a safe place for your certificates.
  • Integration: The integration services include interface services such as BizTalk and Azure Service Bus, but also message helpers such as storage queues.
  • Media and CDN: These are basically two services. One is the CDN, which makes it possible to build your own content delivery network based on Azure. The other is media services that make it very easy to use and process different media with the help of Azure.
  • Web and mobile: These include all of the services that assist in creating apps or backend services for the web and mobiles, for example, web apps and API apps.
  • Developer services: These are cloud-based development tools for version control, collaboration, and other development-related tasks. The Azure SDK is a part of the developer services.
  • Data: The data services contain all of the different database types that you can deploy in Azure (SQL, DocumentDB, MongoDB, Table storage, and so on) and diverse tools to configure them.
  • Analytics and IoT: As the name suggests, analytics services are tools to analyze and process data. This offers a broad range of possibilities, from machine learning to stream analytics. These can, but don't have to, build on certain data services. The Internet of Things (IoT) services include the fundamental tools needed to work with devices used for the IoT, such as the Raspberry Pi 2.
  • Hybrid operations: This category sums up all of the remaining services that could not clearly be categorized. These include backup, monitoring, and disaster recovery, as well as many others.

 The infrastructure services are as follows:

  • Operating system and server compute: This category consists of compute containers. It includes virtual machine containers and, additionally, container services, which are quite new to the product range.
  • Storage: Storage services are the two main storage types—BLOB and file storage. They have different pricing tiers depending on the speed and latency of the storage ordered. 
  • Networking: This category consists of basic networking resources. Examples are load balancer, ExpressRoute, and VPN gateways.

The important thing is to remember that we are talking about a rapidly changing and very agile cloud computing platform. After this chapter, if you have not already done so, you should start using Azure by experimenting, exploring, and implementing your solutions while reading the correlating chapters.

 

 

For testing purposes, you should use the Azure FreeTrial (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/offers/ms-azr-0044p/‎), Visual Studio Dev Essentials (https://www.visualstudio.com/dev-essentials/), or the included Azure amount from an MSDN subscription.