Learning Microsoft Azure

Chapter 1. Getting Started with Microsoft Azure

This chapter introduces Microsoft Azure, the process of implementing it, and the features and services it can offer us. We will cover the following topics:

A brief overview of cloud computing and Microsoft Azure
Selecting a Microsoft Azure solution
Administration of a Microsoft Azure system
Choosing a subscription
A walk-through of creating a Microsoft Azure account
Exploring the Microsoft Azure Management portal
Examining all the Microsoft Azure service options

An overview of cloud computing

Cloud computing is a term for computing resources and services such as server and network infrastructure, web servers, and databases, hosted by cloud service vendors, rented by tenants, and delivered via the Internet.

Cloud computing companies such as Microsoft and Google offer a variety of computing services built on top of their own infrastructure, which are managed in dedicated globally distributed data centers that offer high availability, resilience, and scalability.

There are three types of cloud service models, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). IaaS is the lowest service tier that offers server, storage, and networking infrastructure, which users can build their own systems on. PaaS allows users to create and deploy applications without having to worry about the infrastructure that's hosting it using services and tools designed to streamline the development and deployment processes. SaaS offers on-demand software products, which remove the infrastructure and software installation and setup overhead; web mail providers are an example of SaaS, where users can send and receive mails using a website rather than having to install a mail client on their machine.

Cloud services are often a cost-effective alternative to traditional on-premises infrastructure, which requires an initial investment in hardware and licenses and requires continual maintenance and expansion as required as well as utility costs such as premises' rent, electricity, and ISP.

There are four main cloud deployment models: public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and community cloud. Public cloud services are hosted by a vendor and made available to the public for use. Private cloud services emulate public cloud services in terms of features but are only available within a company's domain. Community cloud is a private cloud shared between a number of users. Hybrid cloud is a mixture of the other three.

Selecting a Microsoft Azure solution

Before we start looking at everything Microsoft Azure can offer us, we need to take a step back and think about the reasons for choosing it in the first place. The first question is actually whether you should be using a cloud platform rather than your own infrastructure (if you have any); the second question, once you've decided to use a cloud platform, is whether to use Microsoft Azure or an alternative.

The main factors in choosing to deploy systems on a cloud platform are as follows:

Infrastructure capabilities: If your business doesn't currently own infrastructure for hosting your solution, or it doesn't have sufficient capacity, or the business simply doesn't want to invest in its own infrastructure, then a cloud-based solution might be the best
Cost: If a cloud-based solution is more cost-effective than a self-hosted solution irrespective of whether your business owns its own infrastructure or not, it may be a good option

The main reasons for choosing to deploy systems on Microsoft Azure in particular are as follows:

Platform capabilities: If you've decided to build a cloud-based system using .NET, then Microsoft Azure is the obvious choice. If you are building a system on a different platform and Microsoft Azure can support it, it might be a good option.
Cost: If Microsoft Azure can offer the right capabilities and is more cost-effective than other suitable competing platforms, then it's the best choice.

Choosing to host systems on the cloud is not a straightforward decision. You may find that you have to go through the decision-making process on a project-by-project basis rather than having a policy where you always do the same thing for all systems.

Infrastructure capabilities

There is an overhead in managing infrastructure of any scale. The following are the activities that must be performed frequently:

Patch management
Operating system migrations
Platform migrations
Provision for expansion
Maintaining utilities (power, Internet, cooling, and so on)

The different scenarios for managing the infrastructure of a business are as follows:

If your business runs internal systems on just a single server, this may not be a full-time job for someone, but it still needs to be done and may be time-consuming periodically
If your business is on the other end of the spectrum and has two data centers that host hundreds of servers, you will need a team of people to manage them, which will obviously be very costly
If your business doesn't want to invest in its own infrastructure, irrespective of whether it needs enough servers to justify building a data centre, or just a single server with a website and database, it might be your best option to host your systems on a cloud platform
If your business' current infrastructure doesn't have the capacity for your system or it can't meet the required Service Level Agreement (SLA)
If your business has a heavy investment in its own infrastructure and can support future expansion on a variety of platforms, you may be less likely to want to use a cloud platform, but even then, there may be a service your infrastructure can't provide, or a platform it simply can't support, so it may be cheaper and faster to implement it in the cloud

Platform capabilities

If your business builds systems using Microsoft technologies, then Azure would be the logical choice, because although it now supports a number of platforms, Windows Servers, SQL Server Databases, and .NET platform tooling have been established long ago and have a fantastic toolset.

If, for example, your company does own its own infrastructure, but it's designed for running Java websites on Linux operating systems, and you have a requirement to build and host some .NET systems, you may want to choose to build your system on Microsoft Azure instead of provisioning more servers.

If Microsoft technologies are not your normal choice and you want to build a system on a cloud platform, you may choose Azure if it is more cost-effective than a competitor cloud service provider for a comparable design and SLA.

Cost

Cost can be one of the main drivers behind most decisions in a business; it has come up in both decision-making steps for choosing to use a cloud solution, then Microsoft Azure, so it's clearly important. I'd love to get straight down to talking about coding and deciding which bits of Microsoft Azure to use for what; we still have a responsibility to make the best decisions for our business and that includes designing a cost-effective system.

If you're working on a personal project, you may want to pick up a technology for reasons such as it being new or looking interesting; everyone does this and we might not mind if it costs us a few pounds (dollars or whatever), but in a business, we need to make the right choice ourselves or convince other people of the right choice, especially in the case of larger organizations, and that means choosing a solution that is cost effective.

We can use the pricing calculator to help us work out how much a system will cost once we have designed it; it is available at http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/.

Decision flow diagrams

I've tried to distil all this into two flow diagrams to help you with the decision-making process. You can use the following flow diagram to decide whether to implement a cloud-based system:

Once we've decided that building a cloud-based system is the right thing to do, we can use the following flow diagram to help us decide whether Microsoft Azure is the best platform:

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.

Choosing a subscription

The subscription you choose will depend on the type of project you are doing and its scale. If you are doing some experimentation or prototyping a system, which may never go into production, you may just want to use a free trial, which is time- and usage-limited, or go for a Pay-as-you-go option, where you pay for what you use rather than committing to a fixed payment. If you're a university student, your university may apply for a 5-month Educator Grant at http://www.microsoftazurepass.com/azureu.

To get started, you may need to do some design work to get some idea of the services you may require, what service tier you want, and how many instances of each service you may use, then go to the pricing calculator and start working out how much your monthly expenditure might be. There is a complete chapter dedicated to designing a system, and this whole book will help you choose which services you require, but we need a subscription to get started, so we'll talk about it now.

Once we have an idea about what our monthly expenditure might be, we can take a look at the purchase options page at http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/purchase-options/.

The following table taken from the purchase options page shows us the discounts based on the base Pay-as-you-go rate and monthly commitment to spend in USD (there is a picker on the left-hand side of the page to change the currency):

Monthly

Committed Spend

6-Month

Monthly Pay

12-Month

Monthly Pay

6-Month

Pre-Pay

12-Month

Pre-Pay

$500 TO £14,999

20%

22.5%

25%

$15,000 TO £39,999

23%

25.5%

28%

$40,000 AND ABOVE

27%

29.5%

30%

As with most commodities, the more you commit to spend, the better discount you get, and you save even more committing to pay for the whole term in one go.

You can pay by invoice as well as by credit card; the page at http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/invoicing/ has details about requesting invoiced payments.

Exploring the portal

Now that we have a subscription, we can go and start exploring the portal at https://manage.windowsazure.com/. When you go into the portal for the first time, you'll be presented with a nice tour wizard, which is a really good way of learning about the portal's features; step through the wizard, and then we'll look at these features and more without the wizard.

The top toolbar

The top toolbar allows us to access some of the top-level options for the portal; there are six buttons:

The various options available in the top toolbar are as follows:

Home button (1): Wherever you are in the portal, clicking on the home button will take you back to the main ALL ITEMS dashboard.
Top menu (2): This drop-down menu contains links, which take you out of the portal to Microsoft Azure's web resources; you'll notice that the same menu appears on all Microsoft Azure websites:
The menu available inside the top menu is as follows:
- HOME: This links to the main Microsoft Azure site.
- PRICING: This links to the price calculator for all Microsoft Azure services.
- DOCUMENTATION: This links to the Microsoft Azure documentation home page; from here, you can find a large amount of reference material, code samples, and tutorials.
- DOWNLOADS: This links to the downloads page, where you can find links to SDKs for all platforms and command-line tools.
- COMMUNITY: This links to the community page from where we can find links to recent Microsoft Azure team blogs, links to other Azure blogs, and useful information to help us be up-to-date with what's going on with Microsoft Azure services. This is helpful because the platform is continually growing and changing, so it's good to be able to see what's going on.
- SUPPORT: This links to the support page, which lists various support options for technical and billing issues, and contains links to MSDN forums.
Credit status flyout (3): If you have a subscription with a credit allowance, this displays the remaining credit for the month and number of days until the end of the month:
Subscriptions menu (4): This menu allows you to adjust which subscriptions and their associated services are displayed in the portal; if you have a lot of subscriptions, you can even search for them! At the bottom of the page, there are also some useful links for managing your account:
Language menu (5): The language menu allows you to change the portal's display language to a number of supported languages:
Main menu (6): Clicking on your username at the top-right corner of the screen opens the main menu, which allows you to sign out, change password, view your bill, contact support, and access some other legal bits:

The side toolbar

The toolbar at the left-hand side allows you to view all items and navigate to service workspaces such as WEB SITES, VIRTUAL MACHINES, and MOBILE SERVICES:

The bottom toolbar

The bottom toolbar allows you to create new services, control the current service selected in a workspace, and view notifications:

The various options available in the bottom toolbar are as follows:

Create new (1): Clicking on the + NEW button on the bottom toolbar opens the Create New menu from where you can create new services:
Commands (2): The command bar provides contextual commands for controlling the currently selected service; in the preceding example screenshot, the controls are used for running a website, allowing you to browse, stop, restart, and delete it, and also allowing you to install WebMatrix, which is a lightweight web development tool.
Notifications (3): The notifications bar will appear at the bottom of the portal to alert you of any issues you may need to address; they have three levels:
- Error
- Warning
- Information
Clicking on an alert symbol opens the alert banner showing more information:
Completed operations (4): A number of activities in the portal can take a while to complete and run asynchronously; once they complete, the completed operations' count indicator gets incremented, and clicking on this button shows you the completed operations' banners:
Individual operations can be dismissed by clicking on OK, or all of them can be dismissed by clicking on DISMISS COMPLETED at the top of the page.
Help (5): Clicking on the help button displays a contextual help menu that provides help information about the current service:

Examining Microsoft Azure Services

We'll start taking a look at all the Microsoft Azure services available to us; while we do this, it's helpful to refer to the portal, and use the +NEW button to see the different options for each category. Don't be afraid to create a service to take a closer look; you can always delete it afterwards.

Compute services

Compute services are a collection of services used for building different types of scalable, resilient applications on Microsoft Azure. We'll take a look at these now and see what they can offer us.

Websites

Microsoft Azure websites are a secure, scalable platform for publishing websites on a number of platforms (ASP.NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, and Classic ASP) with SQL Server and MySQL databases; there is also a large gallery of website templates for building websites on app frameworks such as Django, blog sites such as WordPress, and forums such as phpBB; to see the full list, click on the New Service button, and then navigate to COMPUTE | WEB SITE | FROM GALLERY.

Websites support SSL certificates for secure HTTPS sessions and custom domain names with A and CNAME records (for supporting a single domain name for a number of load-balanced web servers). Website instances can be manually or automatically (on schedule or on CPU metrics) scaled up and down to meet business demands. Websites can run in three modes, FREE, SHARED, or STANDARD, where FREE and SHARED run on a multitenant environment (a shared web server), but the SHARED mode has a higher resource quota than FREE. STANDARD runs on a dedicated virtual machine (small, medium, large size options similar to virtual machines).

Virtual machines

Virtual machines offer you a scalable server infrastructure to build your systems from scratch. They are available as Windows Server or Linux operating systems, and there are a number of images available with server software such as SharePoint, SQL Server, and Oracle preinstalled. To take a look at the complete list, click on the New Service button, and then navigate to COMPUTE | VIRTUAL MACHINE | FROM GALLERY.

There are currently eight image sizes ranging from extra small (shared core, 768 MB RAM) to A7 (eight cores, 56 GB RAM) and default (one core, 1.75 GB RAM); obviously, the bigger the image, the higher the cost. You can see the prices in the pricing calculator at http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?scenario=virtual-machines. Virtual machines are charged at compute hours and have a monthly value in the calculator; Windows Server and Linux images cost the same, but the price increases with additional server software due to the extra licensing cost.

Mobile services

Mobile services are designed for mobile app developers so that they have a simple platform to quickly create secure (OAuth2 and key-based authentication over SSL) database and custom APIs and easily make push notification requests on all major mobile platforms (Windows Store, Windows Phone, iOS, and Android). Backend services can be created on Node.js or .NET; Node.js, which is the original platform, can be scripted in the portal directly or locally, and can be pushed using Git version control, whereas .NET backends, which are a relatively new addition, are created locally and published in a similar way to other web applications.

There's a complete set of SDKs for integrating mobile applications and other backend services for a growing number of platforms including Windows Store, Windows Phone, iOS, Android, Xamarin, HTML, and Sencha.

I recently wrote an entire book on this subject, which is available from Packt Publishing at http://www.packtpub.com/learning-windows-azure-mobile-services-for-windows-8-and-windows-phone-8/book.

Cloud services

Cloud services allow you to create scalable applications that have a high availability (99.95 percent monthly SLA). There are two main types of cloud services: web role and worker role. Web roles are web applications hosted on IIS in their own environment. They are different from normal websites as they have extra capabilities listed in the following bullet list (although websites can now be staged too), to start with web roles can start life as a website, then easily be added to a web role at a later stage if they require these additional capabilities. Worker roles are a bit like Windows Services, where they are applications with no user interface, which can perform long-running tasks from things such as processing data of a table to hosting a proprietary TCP server. Cloud service roles have the following characteristics:

They run on their own virtual machine
They can be scaled as required
They can be deployed to multideployment environments (staging and live)
They allow remote desktop onto their virtual machines
They execute start-up tasks

Data services

Data services are a collection of data-storage-related services including fully relational SQL Server Database, table storage, various Binary Large Objects (blobs) and disk-storage options, and storage queues. We'll take a look at each one in more detail now.

SQL Server Database

Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a fully managed, highly scalable relational database with a high availability (99.95 percent SLA). Microsoft Azure SQL Server is very similar to a SQL Server in terms of Transact-SQL (TSQL) and Tabular Data Stream (TDS) but has a number of features it does not support, such as:

Backup and restore (this will be supported when the new service tiers are made available)
Replication
Extended stored procedures
SQL Server agent/jobs

A full list of differences can be found here, although it doesn't currently mention SQL Server 2012 or 2014: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff394115.aspx.

Databases are available in three tiers of service:

Web: This is a scalable managed database up to 10 MB
Business editions: These are scalable managed databases up to 150 GB
Premium edition: This is the same as premium editions but with reserved resource capacity for applications that may have a high peak loading, many concurrent requests, or require guaranteed low request latency

Databases benefit from having two data center replicas (for any tier of service) and the option to scale out as required (splitting large databases across multiple servers to improve performance).

Storages

Microsoft Azure storage offers resilient, scalable storage for unstructured text and binary data such as logfiles, images, and videos. There are four types of storages:

Block blobs: This is the simplest way of storing large volumes of nonstructured data. Blobs can be accessed through managed SDKs and from anywhere via REST APIs. Block blobs are made up of a maximum of 50,000 blocks, having a size of up to 4 MB each, with a maximum total size of 200 GB.
Page blobs and disks: Page blobs are optimized for frequent updates and random access and are actually used as the storage media for Microsoft Azure VHD disks. Page blobs are collections of 512 byte pages; pages worth 1 to 4 MB can be written in one go and a maximum of 1 TB is available for a single blob.
Tables: Tables are a NoSQL (a nonrelational database) way of storing data, rather than storing data in a relational way, like in a traditional SQL Server Database, where we have tables, which have relationships with other tables via primary and foreign keys; Microsoft Azure tables allow you to create a container table, and then define classes that belong to it. These classes have a partition key, row key, and timestamp property, which allow them to be queried. Microsoft Azure tables allow us to store large amounts of data in a highly scalable way while still allowing efficient querying.
Queues: Queues are a messaging system that allows processes to exchange data between tiers of a system via a message queue. They are helpful for building scalable worker processes. Queues can be accessed via native SDKs and REST services.

HDInsight

HDInsight is a relatively new addition to the Microsoft Azure service family; it is a service based on Apache Hadoop (http://hadoop.apache.org/), which helps us integrate multiple data sources of different types and structures into Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) tools such as Power Pivot and Power View.

Cache

Microsoft Azure Cache is a high-performance, in-memory distributed cache that allows scaled-out applications to share data without having to use a database. This can be useful for adding session state and page caching to ASP.NET applications (although session state is not generally a good practice for modern web applications, it may be useful for legacy applications or if you really can't live without it!) and also doing your own custom caching in worker roles for maintaining the state across instances. Cache is available in three tiers:

Basic: This is a shared cache with a size ranging from 128 MB to 1 GB
Standard: This is a dedicated cache with a size ranging from 1 GB to 10 GB
Premium: This is a dedicated cache with a size ranging from 5 GB to 150 GB

Recovery services

The recovery services allow you to create Hyper-V recovery manager vaults, which allow you to back up your Hyper-V system to the Microsoft Azure cloud and backup vaults, which can be used for backing up files and folders from servers.

App services

App services are a collection of services that help cloud and on-premises applications and services to interact with each other. They can be implemented on systems ranging from media-streaming services to multi-tier enterprise business systems. We'll look at each of these now.

Media services

Media services provide a scalable media processing workflow for digital media systems such as video-streaming services, from ingest through encoding, format conversion, and content protection, to on-demand and live streaming.

Service Bus

Service Bus is a collection of services used for enabling communication between different processes in distributed, multi-tier systems. The various Service Buses are as follows:

Queue: Service Bus queues as with .NET queues are first in, first out (FIFO) collections of messages that allow applications to communicate with each other asynchronously by publishing and consuming messages. This can be very helpful for building scalable systems across multiple tiers especially when part of the system may not always be online. It can also help with load leveling, where a consuming application can process batches of data in a controlled way rather than being driven by the producing application. Messages are processed by a single consumer and can be read in the ReceiveAndDelete mode, where the message will immediately be marked as consumed and returned to the provider and the PeekLock mode, where a consumer can get a temporary lock while it processes the request; then, if it cannot process the message, it can abandon it, or if it fails completely, the message will time out, allowing another process to consume it.
Topic: In contrast to queues, where we have a one-to-one relationship between a provider and a consumer, topics have a one-to-many relationship, where we create a topic with a number of subscriptions. Then, a provider can send messages to the topic, and subscribing clients can receive messages from subscriptions they are interested in.
Relay: Relays are different from topics and queues in that they don't offer disconnected services; instead, they can securely expose on-premises service endpoints, allowing them to be accessed directly by applications in the cloud.
Notification Hub: The Notification Hub service is a really nice way of handling push notifications to mobile apps from backend services in an efficient, scalable manner. Mobile apps on all major platforms can register to receive push notifications (in the case of Windows Store and Windows Phone applications, these are Toast, Tile, Badge, and Raw notifications), and from the backend service, just one request per platform is required to make the request rather than making requests per subscribed channel. The Notifications Hub also has a tagging feature, where users can subscribe to certain tagged topics and also template notifications, which can be used for localization support. The Notifications Hub handles all communications with the native Push Notification Services (PNS).

Visual Studio Online

Visual Studio Online services allow Visual Studio Online accounts to be integrated into Microsoft Azure, enabling us to view, build, and load the testing status in the dashboard and enable continuous deployment so that websites can be deployed to a test environment on build when code is checked in.

BizTalk Services

BizTalk Services allow on-premises applications to interact with each other via the cloud, providing messaging endpoints and transforming messages between services for interoperability.

Scheduler

The scheduler allows scheduled jobs to be created to perform operations such as making HTTP requests and performing actions on storage queues. Jobs can be scheduled to run once on demand, at a specific time, or at various intervals.

Active Directory (AD)

The following are the features of Azure AD:

Azure AD allows you to manage user credentials and application access in your Microsoft Azure system. It is an Azure-specific, REST-based implementation of Active Directory, which is used with on-premises systems.
Access Control Service (ACS) provide an easy way of authorizing and authenticating users with support for the following authentication mechanisms:
- Windows Identity Foundation (WIF)
- Built-in support for Microsoft Account, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter
- Active Directory Federated Services (ADFS)
- OAuth 2.0
- JSON Web Token (JWT), SAML 1.1, SAML 2.0, and Simple Web Token (SWT)
ACS also offers Home Realm Discovery, allowing users to choose an identity provider, an OData-based management service, and a browser-based management portal.
Multifactor authentication is an extra layer of security for applications. If you have a Windows Store account, you must have noticed that a PIN is sent to a configured mobile phone or e-mail address, which you must enter before signing in with your Microsoft account. This can be added to on-premises applications using ADFS, and to systems integrated with Windows Azure AD.

Network services

Network services are a collection of services related to networking between services, and allow us to create virtual networks and load balance traffic across services in different Azure locations.

Virtual Network

Virtual Network allows you to create a private IPv4 network space in Azure, securely extend your on-premises networks into Azure, and configure a custom DNS server for services on Virtual Network.

Traffic Manager

Traffic Manager allows user traffic to be distributed to the most appropriate cloud service or website within the same data center or across global data centers depending on the load-balancing method chosen. Traffic management requires one of the following three load-balancing methods:

Performance: This allows users to be redirected to the closest geographic endpoints
Round-Robin: This evenly distributes traffic between services
Failover: If a service fails or goes offline, requests will be rerouted to another service

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deploymentMonkey Feb 05, 2015

I am very pleased with the content and the way it is delivered.It is a great source of information for IT professionals who want to make a first step on Microsoft Azure with a single book and for those who want to use it as a reference book.It covers many of Microsoft Azure technologies including VMs,AD,SQL Azure etc and is full of configuration examples. Examples are really helpful to learn how to use the information provided in the book to the real-world needs.For me it's a must-have book to be one step ahead on Azure.

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Msingh1 Feb 07, 2015

This book gives a very comprehensive, step by step tutorial on how to build systems usingMicrosoft's Azure cloud platform. I found it particularly useful in learning how to create adatabase application using Azure's SQL server database. One section in the book, took theuser through the process of creating a reallife data model to deploying it on the cloud. It thendescribed how to create an MVC based azure website using this database, and integratingActive Directory for user authentication and authorization. The step by step instructions wereconcise and clear, and their use of appropriate screenshots, made it very easy to follow.There is so much more in this book. I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking to migratetheir on premise development to the cloud.

Parenzan Marco Jan 12, 2015

The book presents the usage of many Azure services, composing an interesting and quite complex sample application through out the book.I appreciate the chapters about mobile and desktop applications as sample clients for cloud services, next to typical web app. I have appreciated the detailed description of deployment, debugging and authentication: I will use them as a reference guide.All chapters are easy to read. Some of them, like Cloud Services and Service Bus Topics, can be difficult to understand why applying them.The topic I really miss is a chapter about usage of Azure Storage at application level and storage opportunities in Azure in general (caching, NoSQL).It is a great book for anyone wants migrating his existing legacy asp.net web projects to Azure. It is not a book for who is searching an introduction to cloud principles, how to apply them in Azure and how to rethink application architecture.A worth read.

Anastasios Piotopoulos Feb 04, 2015

Cloud computing has already consolidated its presence in the tech industry, and it is quickly becoming a standard choice for hosting enterprise applications. The greatest advantage of the cloud is that resources are provisioned rapidly and on demand, without human intervention on the provider's part. Moreover, every provider offers a wide range of services that can significantly extend the capabilities of hosted application.In order to harvest the true power of the cloud, one needs thorough knowledge of distributed systems theory, awareness of which services are offered by the targeted cloud platform, plus a solid strategy for identifying and properly separating the concerns of a system. The ultimate goal for every cloud software architect is to design a reliable, highly-available system which can dynamically scale on demand to meet business needs.Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform. I have been designing and developing cloud applications on Azure for the last few years, starting as an early adopter and watching it grow rapidly ever since. Unfortunately, Azure's documentation focuses on each of the services offered separately, providing little to no advice on how to design a complete cloud solution. I ended up spending months researching, experimenting and brainstorming in order to come up with an acceptable architecture for a specific enterprise solution.Recently I came across a book called "Learning Microsoft Azure", written by Geoff Webber-Cross. Its purpose is to teach software engineers the main aspects of the Azure platform, and to do so in the context of the best architectural approach possible. It is a promising effort of great significance, and Geoff has done it wonderfully. The book is not just for Azure beginners; I was able to gain a lot from it, even after working on Azure for about three years on a daily basis.In Learning Microsoft Azure, Geoff helps you build pieces of an enterprise cloud application called "Azure Bakery". By the time you have worked through all the chapters, Geoff has introduced you to the three principal types of cloud service models (Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service) as well as to all major services that Azure provides (Websites, Cloud Services, Active Directory, Mobile Services, Virtual Machines, SQL, Storage, Service Bus, Diagnostics, Visual Studio Online and more). He also offers fully-functioning code samples leveraging the Azure SDK, plus demonstrating the capabilities of various other development frameworks, like ASP.NET MVC, WEB API and SignalR. Finally, Geoff offers a comprehensive guide on deploying applications to Azure, a process which requires great attention, especially when it is performed on live systems.I found that Chapter 8, regarding worker roles, is one of the most important chapters in the book. Worker roles are used to perform CPU- or network-intensive tasks in an asynchronous manner. Experience shows that almost every cloud application uses at least one worker role. Apart from the theoretical background offered on worker roles, Geoff demonstrates the internal lifecycle of a cloud service, along with some solid code practices to follow when developing one.Geoff provides an excellent starting point for creating sound and maintainable cloud architectures. Those architectures involve proper separation of concerns and allow various parts of a solution to scale independently. The book is targeted towards intermediate software engineers who are already proficient in OOP and C#. Keep in mind that many of the design decisions described within the book are transferable, meaning that they can be used while developing solutions for other cloud platforms.I enjoyed the book and I found it valuable. I consider it to be the missing manual for Microsoft Azure. I believe you will enjoy it too!

Ricardo Peres Feb 11, 2015

IntroductionThis time, it is an introductory book, where the reader is introduced to Microsoft Azure, and guided as he/she develops a full solution for an imaginary industrial bakery, from end to end, including a mobile app. It covers technologies such as ASP.NET MVC 5, Windows Phone 8, Entity Framework Code First and Web API, always using C# and .NET as the backing framework. At the end of each chapter, there’s a questions and answers page where we can assess our level of understanding of the topics that were discussed in it.The author is Geoff Webber-Cross (@webbercross), which also authored another book on Azure and Windows Phone.Chapter 1: Getting Started with Microsoft AzureThe first chapter, as we might expect, does an introduction to cloud computing and the Microsoft Azure service, presents a decision framework for aiding in selecting a cloud service as opposed to on-premises, guides the reader in creating an Azure account including it’s many services and costs, and lists the most relevant terms that we will be encountering throughout the book.Chapter 2: Designing a System for Microsoft AzureHere we are presented with the sample scenario, its objectives and requirements and the architectural vision of it. Different views on the system and its subsystems are presented and for each the technical decisions are explained.Chapter 3: Starting to Develop with Microsoft AzureNext we setup the development environment, choose a Visual Studio edition, download the required SDK and create a project to be published in our Azure account. Visual Studio Online is also presented and it’s integration with Azure, namely, in order to ensure continuous integration and delivery.Chapter 4: Creating and Managing a Windows Azure SQL Server DatabaseHere we get an overview of the SQL functionality of Azure, how to create and manage databases using the portal, Visual Studio and the SQL Server Management Studio, then we learn how to use Entity Framework Code First to access and manipulate its data, and to migrate to and from different versions using the Migrations API.Chapter 5: Building Azure MVC WebsitesThis chapter explains how we can build an MVC application using OAuth authentication (social accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, Google and Microsoft Live). It goes on explaining how we can set up custom domains and SSL certificates for HTTPS and how to integrate the Azure Active Directory for single sign-on and custom permissions.Chapter 6: Azure Website Diagnostics and DebuggingThis one is about diagnosing problems and debugging our applications. It presents the basic built-in tracing and logging features of Azure and how we can obtain this information and goes on to show how we can use table storage and blobs for custom storing of structured logs and its querying. Kudu is briefly introduced and at the end we learn how to do remote debugging.Chapter 7: Azure Service Bus Topic IntegrationNext up is Service Bus, Azure’s enterprise service bus service. We learn how to configure it, create and manage topics using the portal and how to use the service from our MVC application and expose it as a service.Chapter 8: Building Worker RolesThe next chapter is about Worker Roles, a feature of Azure Websites that performs disconnected (non web-related) tasks. The reader is guided in creating a Worker Role with Visual Studio, executing it in the Emulator and publishing it to Azure. The example presented builds on the Service Bus topics discussed in the previous chapter. We also learn about other scheduling mechanism of Azure, Scheduler jobs, and implement an example using Queues.Chapter 9: Cloud Service Diagnostics, Debugging, and ConfigurationHere we learn about configuring and using the diagnostics features of Cloud Services, again expanding the concepts introduced in chapter 6. We talk about IntelliTrace and Remote Debugging and on how to connect to our virtual machines with Remote Desktop. Finally we are given an example on how to use script tasks to automate common needs.Chapter 10: Web API and Client IntegrationThis chapter introduces ASP.NET Web API, Microsoft’s latest technology for building REST web services and SignalR, for asynchronous, duplex, real-time communication between web clients and the server. The provided example shows how to integrate these two technologies to broadcast messages to connected clients, including a desktop Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) application. In the end we learn how to use the Active Directory to authorize accesses to our services.Chapter 11: Integrating a Mobile Application Using Mobile ServicesComing closer to the end, this chapter walks the reader on the various aspects of building a mobile client that connects to the cloud using Azure Mobile Services. We see how to implement a mobile-enabled web application and Web API service, how to publish it and how to implement a matching Windows Phone application, fully featured with push notifications. It also guides us on configuring the mobile service with Active Directory for authentication. At the end we are shown how to build a Windows Store app to interact with our application.Chapter 12: Preparing an Azure System for ProductionThe final chapter puts everything in place, explains how to setup different build configurations for different deployment environments and how to build and deliver deployment packages for Azure. At the very end we get a deployment checklist that may come in handy if ever we run into problems.ConclusionOverall, I enjoyed reading this book. It doesn’t cover all of Azure, but it does a very decent job in explaining how one can build a real-life application that works and handles most typical concerns, including support for mobile devices.

Learning Microsoft Azure: A comprehensive guide to cloud application development using Microsoft Azure

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