If you want to run your services within Azure and Microsoft has no Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Software as a Service (SaaS) offering for that specific service, it is necessary to implement an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution in your environment.

Azure VMs is the IaaS offer from Azure. With VMs (based on Windows or Linux) you have the flexibility to realize your own workloads. These workloads include, in addition to the ability to deploy applications in the cloud, development and testing scenarios and also some enterprise workloads based on Red Hat, Ubuntu, SAP, IBM, and a lot more.

The basic idea behind this offer we now know, but how should we start now? If we look at the whole from the viewpoint of the software architect, the answer is relatively simple: we have to do some planning tasks.

The tasks are as follows:

• Define the workloads for your...

Azure Container Services are a new variant of the classical Azure IaaS offer from Azure (descripted in the first section of this chapter), and they also use virtual machines as the technological base.

Two versions of the Azure IaaS are offered, and both are based on virtual machines, but Azure Container Services has some advantages over the older solution due to its additional functionality.

I will now take a closer look at these advantages and introduce Azure Container Services in detail.

An Azure Container Service helps you to create, configure, or manage a cluster of VMs. These clusters are preconfigured to run applications in so-called containers.

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In the last two sections of this chapter, I have given you the most important facts about the offers in the area Azure IaaS. Now, we are leaving this area in the direction of the PaaS area.

What is a PaaS solution? A PaaS solution is a service or a complete service environment that allows you to deploy and run your own applications.

Let's go to the actual subject of this section: the Azure App Services. Azure App Services are defined as a service environment and are also a part of the Azure Execution Models.

Let's take a look at the first diagram:

As you can see, the Azure App Services currently consists of the following elements:

• Web Apps: Web apps is simply the new name for the Azure websites execution model and does not really differ in its functionality from the previous component (by combining it with other app service elements...

Azure Service Fabric is a PaaS offer for distributed systems that simplifies the packing, provisioning, and management of scalable and reliable microservices. Before we start with a deep analysis, we should deal with the microservice architecture in general.

Let's take a look at the first diagram:

Core elements of this architecture are the services (or microservices). The services are defined by the following characteristics:

• A service is small, which means a service offers only one function in contrast to the application with many functions.
• A service is independent. This has several meanings for our work:
  • Each service has a separate code base, and this without the need to share the same technology stack, libraries, or frameworks. You can use, for example, C# for the first, Java for the second, and a JavaScript...

In this chapter, we were introduced to the basic architectures behind the compute offers from the Azure platform (Azure VMs, Azure Container Services, Azure App Services, and Azure Service Fabric). We have also learned that services never act alone, but rather in the interaction of various Azure resources.

In the next chapter, we will learn all about Azure data services (basic knowledge, architecture, and use cases).