Administration of Microsoft Azure systems

We've talked a lot about whether to use a cloud platform or not, and if your business decides to, whether it will be Microsoft Azure or whether to use your business' infrastructure; so now, we'll look at the administration overhead in looking after a cloud-based system and incorporating it into your business' maintenance and support procedures.

If you have a small organization or you are working on personal projects, you may choose to manage your environments yourself (you may not have a choice) and you may deploy applications to the cloud straight from your development machine. This is fine, but it's worth thinking about managing this process to make things easy for you and save yourself from accidently causing loss of service.

If you work in a larger organization with some governance in place, which dictates how systems should transition from a development environment to a live system and then how they are managed and maintained after that, you may need to put some new procedures in place or modify the existing procedures for handling cloud-based systems.

Using a cloud platform, we don't completely get away from systems management and maintenance overhead. The following are examples of administrative tasks we still need to consider:

• Training: The people responsible for managing cloud systems will need to know how to manage and maintain them. This includes things such as understanding the different environments, using the portal, and how to perform deployments.
• Error logs: Error logs need to be monitored so that problems can be detected and fixed. Error logs will need pruning to avoid paying for unnecessary storage.
• Alerts: Alerts must be set up and configured for the appropriate set of support staff.
• Database maintenance: Databases need to be reindexed and statistics must be recalculated from time to time so that performance doesn't degrade over time.
• Data backup: Microsoft Azure does not automatically back up data, so this needs to be set up.
• OS updates: It's actually possible to disable automatic updates on Azure OSes (this is not the default option), so if your IT policy is to have staged updates, you may wish to disable automatic updates and include Microsoft Azure systems in your update process.
• Billing: Somebody needs to remember to pay the bill for the services the businesses are using. This is especially important if you pay your subscription by invoice and not credit card.
• Password management: Usernames and passwords for Microsoft Azure portals and databases must be securely recorded and made available to the administrative staff.
• Release management: Typically, in medium-to-large organizations, it's not normal for developers to deploy systems for staging or for live environments themselves, so this must be coordinated between developers and system administrators.
• Renew SSL certificates and domain names: If we use custom domain names on our websites or implement SSL security, we will need to renew these periodically.

It's important to think about these things when deciding to implement a cloud-based system, because although there is certainly a huge reduction in administration overhead, particularly on the infrastructure side of things, they aren't completely administration-free.