Book Image

Implementing Azure Cloud Design Patterns

By : Oliver Michalski, Stefano Demiliani
Book Image

Implementing Azure Cloud Design Patterns

By: Oliver Michalski, Stefano Demiliani

Overview of this book

A well designed cloud infrastructure covers factors such as consistency, maintenance, simplified administration and development, and reusability. Hence it is important to choose the right architectural pattern as it has a huge impact on the quality of cloud-hosted services. This book covers all Azure design patterns and functionalities to help you build your cloud infrastructure so it fits your system requirements. This book initially covers design patterns that are focused on factors such as availability and data management/monitoring. Then the focus shifts to complex design patterns such as multitasking, improving scalability, valet keys, and so on, with practical use cases. The book also supplies best practices to improve the security and performance of your cloud. By the end of this book, you will thoroughly be familiar with the different design and architectural patterns available with Windows Azure and capable of choosing the best pattern for your system.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Planned maintenance


Let's get to the area of planned maintenance. This is the only predictable downtime (usually twice a year) on the Azure platform.

Planned maintenance is used to install necessary updates on the platform or for general maintenance, and can have an effect on all of your Azure IaaS deployments (such as Azure VM), or on all of your Azure PaaS solutions based on an Azure VM, (such as Azure Service Fabric).

What are the effects?

Here, I first have to take a small step backward. The majority of planned maintenance will not affect the operations of the platform (for example, storage infrastructure updates or physical network infrastructure updates).

With other updates that affect your VMs directly, things look different. This includes the following:

  • Host security and compliance patching
  • Updates for the Azure host agents
  • Updates for the network agents
  • HW decommissioning
  • HW maintenance
  • Host OS rollout

Since each of these updates places specific requirements on the platform, two subtypes of...