Azure® Essentials

​1. Introduction

​1.1 About the Author

iCertify Training is a New York-based Authorized Professional Certification Training Provider for PMP®, Agile®, ITIL® and Six Sigma® . More than 325,000 persons have been enabled by our certification programs. More than 5,000 students are certified each month enroll with us for enabling their professional trajectory. We offer Classroom, Online and Webinars for professionals, business and government.

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​1.2 About this book

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform, providing a wide variety of services you can use without purchasing and provisioning your own hardware. Azure enables the rapid development of solutions and provides the resources to accomplish tasks that may not be feasible in an on-premises environment. Azure's compute, storage, network, and application services allow you to focus on building great solutions without the need to worry about how the physical infrastructure is assembled.

This book covers the fundamentals of Azure you need to start developing solutions right away. It concentrates on the features of the Azure platform that you are most likely to need to know rather than on every feature and service available on the platform. This book also provides several walkthroughs you can follow to learn how to create VMs and virtual networks, websites and storage accounts, and so on. In many cases, real-world tips are included to help you get the most out of your Azure experience.

In addition to its coverage of core Azure services, the book discusses common tools useful in creating and managing Azure-based solutions. The book wraps up by providing details on a few common business scenarios where Azure can provide compelling and valuable solutions, as well as a chapter providing overviews of some of the commonly used services not covered in the book.

​Who should read this book

This book focuses on providing essential information about the key services of Azure for developers and IT professionals who are new to cloud computing. Detailed, step-by-step demonstrations are included to help the reader understand how to get started with each of the key services. This material is useful not only for those who have no prior experience with Azure, but also for those who need a refresher and those who may be familiar with one area but not others. Each chapter is standalone; there is no requirement that you perform the hands-on demonstrations from previous chapters to understand any particular chapter.

​Assumptions

We expect that you have at least a minimal understanding of virtualized environments and virtual machines. There are no specific skills required overall for this book, but having some knowledge of the topic of each chapter will help you gain a deeper understanding. For example, the chapter on virtual networks will make more sense if you have some understanding of networking, and the chapter on databases will be more useful if you understand what a database is and why you might use one. Web development skills will provide a good background for understanding Azure Web Apps, and some understanding of identity will be helpful when studying the chapter on Active Directory.

​This book might not be for you if...

This book might not be for you if you are looking for an in-depth developer or architecture-focused discussion on a wide range of Azure features, or if you are looking for details on other public or private cloud platforms.

​Organization of this book

This book explores six foundational features of the Microsoft Azure platform, along with insights on getting started with Azure, management tools, and common business scenarios. This book also includes a chapter with overviews of some of the more commonly used services, such as HDInsight (Azure’s Hadoop service) and Service Bus, but there are many services in the Azure platform that are not in the scope of this book, such as Azure Batch, Data Lake Analytics, and Azure DNS, just to mention a few. To learn about all of the services available in the Azure platform, start your journey at http://azure.microsoft.com.

​What is Azure?

The following will give an overview of Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.

​Overview of cloud computing

Cloud computing provides a modern alternative to the traditional on-premises datacenter. A public cloud vendor is completely responsible for hardware purchase and maintenance and provides a wide variety of platform services that you can use. You lease whatever hardware and software services you require on an as-needed basis, thereby converting what had been a capital expense for hardware purchase into an operational expense. It also allows you to lease access to hardware and software resources that would be too expensive to purchase. Although you are limited to the hardware provided by the cloud vendor, you only have to pay for it when you use it.

Cloud environments provide an online portal experience, making it easy for users to manage compute, storage, network, and application resources. For example, in the Azure portal, a user can create a virtual machine (VM) configurations specifying the following: the VM size (with regard to CPU, RAM, and local disks), the operating system, any pre deployed software, the network configuration, and the location of the VM. The user then can deploy the VM based on that configuration and within a few minutes access the deployed VM. This quick deployment compares favorably with the previous mechanism for deploying a physical machine, which could take weeks just for the procurement cycle.

In addition to the public cloud just described, there are private and hybrid clouds. In a private cloud, you create a cloud environment in your own datacenter and provide self-service access to compute resources to users in your organization. This offers a simulation of a public cloud to your users, but you remain completely responsible for the purchase and maintenance of the hardware and software services you provide. A hybrid cloud integrates public and private clouds, allowing you to host workloads in the most appropriate location. For example, you could host a high-scale website in the public cloud and link it to a highly secure database hosted in your private cloud (or on-premises datacenter). Microsoft provides support for public, private, and hybrid clouds. Microsoft Azure, the focus of this book, is a public cloud. Microsoft Azure Stack is an add-on to Windows Server 2016 that allows you to deploy many core Azure services in your own datacenter and provides a self-service portal experience to your users. You can integrate these into a hybrid cloud through the use of a virtual private network.

​Comparison of on-premises versus Azure

With an on-premises infrastructure, you have complete control over the hardware and software that you deploy. Historically, this has led to hardware procurement decisions focused on scaling up; that is, purchasing a server with more cores to satisfy a performance need. With Azure, you can deploy only the hardware provided by Microsoft. This leads to a focus on scale-out through the deployment of additional compute nodes to satisfy a performance need. Although this has consequences for the design of an appropriate software architecture, there is now ample proof that the scale-out of commodity hardware is significantly more cost-effective than scale-up through expensive hardware.

Microsoft has deployed Azure datacenters in over 22 regions around the globe from Melbourne to Amsterdam and Sao Paulo to Singapore. Additionally, Microsoft has an arrangement with 21Vianet, making Azure available in two regions in China. Microsoft has also announced the deployment of Azure to another eight regions. Only the largest global enterprises are able to deploy datacenters in this manner, so using Azure makes it easy for enterprises of any size to deploy their services close to their customers, wherever they are in the world. And you can do that without ever leaving your office.

For startups, Azure allows you to start with very low cost and scale rapidly as you gain customers. You  would not face a large up-front capital investment to create a new VM—or even several new VMs. The  use of cloud computing fits well with the scale fast, fail fast model of startup growth.

Azure provides the flexibility to set up development and test configurations quickly. These deployments can be scripted, giving you the ability to spin up a development or test environment, do the testing, and spin it back down. This keeps the cost very low, and maintenance is almost nonexistent.

Another advantage of Azure is that you can try new versions of software without having to upgrade on-premises equipment. For example, if you want to see the ramifications of running your application against Microsoft SQL Server 2016 instead of Microsoft SQL Server 2014, you can create a SQL Server 2016 instance and run a copy of your services against the new database, all without having to allocate hardware and run wires. Or you can run on a VM with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 instead of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2.

​Cloud offering

Cloud computing usually is classified in three categories: SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. However, as the cloud matures, the distinction among these is being eroded.

SaaS: Software as a service

SaaS is a software that is centrally hosted and managed for the end customer. It usually is based on a multitenant architecture—a single version of the application is used for all customers. It can be scaled out to multiple instances to ensure the best performance in all locations. SaaS software typically is licensed through a monthly or annual subscription.

Microsoft Office 365 is a prototypical model of a SaaS offering. Subscribers pay a monthly or annual subscription fee, and they get Exchange as a Service (online and/or desktop Outlook), Storage as a Service (OneDrive), and the rest of the Microsoft Office Suite (online, the desktop version, or both). Subscribers are always provided the most recent version. This essentially allows you to have a Microsoft Exchange server without having to purchase a server and install and support Exchange—the Exchange server is managed for you, including software patches and updates. Compared to installing and upgrading Office every year, this is much less expensive and requires much less effort to keep updated.

Other examples of SaaS include Dropbox, WordPress, and Amazon Kindle.

PaaS: Platform as a service

With PaaS, you deploy your application into an application-hosting environment provided by the cloud service vendor. The developer provides the application, and the PaaS vendor provides the ability to deploy and run it. This frees developers from infrastructure management, allowing them to focus strictly on development.

Azure provides several PaaS compute offerings, including the Web Apps feature in Azure App Service and Azure Cloud Services (web and worker roles). In either case, developers have multiple ways to deploy their application without knowing anything about the nuts and bolts supporting it. Developers don’t have to create VMs, use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to log into each one, and install the application. They just hit a button (or pretty close to it), and the tools provided by Microsoft provision the VMs and then deploy and install the application on them.

IaaS: Infrastructure as a service

An IaaS cloud vendor runs and manages server farms running virtualization software, enabling you to create VMs that run on the vendor’s infrastructure. Depending on the vendor, you can create a VM running Windows or Linux and install anything you want on it. Azure provides the ability to set up virtual networks, load balancers, and storage and to use many other services that run on its infrastructure. You don’t have control over the hardware or virtualization software, but you do have control over almost everything else. In fact, unlike PaaS, you are completely responsible for it.

Azure Virtual Machines, the Azure IaaS offering, is a popular choice when migrating services to Azure because it enables the lift and shift model for migration. You can configure a VM similar to the infrastructure currently running your services in your datacenter and migrate your software to the new VM. You might need to make tweaks, such as URLs to other services or storage, but many applications can be migrated in this manner.

Azure VM Scale Sets (VMSS) is built on top of Azure Virtual Machines and provides an easy way to deploy clusters of identical VMs. VMSS also supports autoscaling so that new VMs can be deployed automatically when required. This makes VMSS an ideal platform to host higher-level microservice compute clusters such as for Azure Service Fabric and the Azure Container Service.

​Azure services

Azure includes many services in its cloud computing platform. Let’s talk about a few of them.

●  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), RemoteApp, 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.

When migrating an application, it is worthwhile to have some understanding of the different services

available in Azure because you might be able to use them to simplify the migration of your

application and improve its robustness. It is impossible for us to cover everything in this book, but

there