Microsoft Azure Quick Guide

The popular trend in today's technology driven world is ‘Cloud Computing’. Cloud computing can be referred to as the storing and accessing of data over the internet rather than your computer's hard drive. This means you don't access the data from either your computer's hard drive or over a dedicated computer network (home or office network). Cloud computing means data is stored at a remote place and is synchronized with other web information.

One prominent example of cloud computing is Office 365 which allows users to store, access, edit their MS Office documents online (in browser) without installing the actual program on their device.

The architecture of cloud computing comprises of the following components −

• Front-end device
• Back-end platform
• Cloud-based delivery
• Network

Front-end Devices − These are basically the devices that are used by clients to access the data or program using the browser or special applications.

Back-end Platform − There are various computers, servers, virtual machines, etc. that combine to become a back-end platform.

The storage options on cloud is in 3 forms −

• Public
• Private
• Hybrid

Public Cloud − A service provider makes the clouds available to the general public which is termed as a public cloud. These clouds are accessed through internet by users. These are open to public and their infrastructure is owned and operated by service providers as in case of Google and Microsoft.

Private Cloud − These clouds are dedicated to a particular organization. That particular organization can use the cloud for storing the company's data, hosting business application, etc. The data stored on public cloud can't be shared with other organizations. The cloud is managed either by the organization itself or by the third party.

Hybrid Cloud − When two or more clouds are bound together to offer the advantage of both public and private clouds, they are termed as Hybrid Cloud. Organizations can use private clouds for sensitive application, while public clouds for non-sensitive applications. The hybrid clouds provide flexible, scalable and cost-effective solutions to the organizations.

There are many benefits of clouds. Some of them are listed below.

Cloud service offers scalability. Allocation and de-allocation of resources is dynamically as per demand.

It saves on cost by reducing capital infrastructure.

It allows the user to access the application independent of their location and hardware configuration.

It simplifies the network and lets the client access the application without buying license for individual machine.

Storing data on clouds is more reliable as it is not lost easily.

Next comes how cloud services are categorized. S stand for Software, P stands for Platform and I for Infrastructure in SPI. SaaS is Software as a service; PaaS is Platform as a service and IaaS is Infrastructure as a Service.

PASS Model − Microsoft Azure

IAAS Model − Amazon S3 Microsoft Azure - Windows

There are many cloud computing platforms offered by different organizations. Windows Azure is one of them, which is provided by Microsoft. Azure can be described as the managed data centers that are used to build, deploy, manage the applications and provide services through a global network. The services provided by Microsoft Azure are PaaS and IaaS. Many programming languages and frameworks are supported by it.

As the name suggests, a platform is provided to clients to develop and deploy software. The clients can focus on the application development rather than having to worry about hardware and infrastructure. It also takes care of most of the operating systems, servers and networking issues.

The overall cost is low as the resources are allocated on demand and servers are automatically updated.

It is less vulnerable as servers are automatically updated and being checked for all known security issues. The whole process is not visible to developer and thus does not pose a risk of data breach.

Since new versions of development tools are tested by the Azure team, it becomes easy for developers to move on to new tools. This also helps the developers to meet the customer’s demand by quickly adapting to new versions.

There are portability issues with using PaaS. There can be a different environment at Azure, thus the application might have to be adapted accordingly.

It is a managed compute service that gives complete control of the operating systems and the application platform stack to the application developers. It lets the user to access, manage and monitor the data centers by themselves.

This is ideal for the application where complete control is required. The virtual machine can be completely adapted to the requirements of the organization or business.

IaaS facilitates very efficient design time portability. This means application can be migrated to Windows Azure without rework. All the application dependencies such as database can also be migrated to Azure.

IaaS allows quick transition of services to clouds, which helps the vendors to offer services to their clients easily. This also helps the vendors to expand their business by selling the existing software or services in new markets.

Since users are given complete control they are tempted to stick to a particular version for the dependencies of applications. It might become difficult for them to migrate the application to future versions.

There are many factors which increases the cost of its operation. For example, higher server maintenance for patching and upgrading software.

There are lots of security risks from unpatched servers. Some companies have welldefined processes for testing and updating on-premise servers for security vulnerabilities. These processes need to be extended to the cloud-hosted IaaS VMs to mitigate hacking risks.

The unpatched servers pose a great security risk. Unlike PaaS, there is no provision of automatic server patching in IaaS. An unpatched server with sensitive information can be very vulnerable affecting the entire business of an organization.

It is difficult to maintain legacy apps in Iaas. It can be stuck with the older version of the operating systems and application stacks. Thus, resulting in applications that are difficult to maintain and add new functionality over the period of time.

It becomes necessary to understand the pros and cons of both services in order to choose the right one according your requirements. In conclusion it can be said that, PaaS has definite economic advantages for operations over IaaS for commodity applications. In PaaS, the cost of operations breaks the business model. Whereas, IaaS gives complete control of the OS and application platform stack.

Azure Management Portal is an interface to manage the services and infrastructure launched in 2012. All the services and applications are displayed in it and it lets the user manage them.

A free trial account can be created on Azure management portal by visiting the following link - manage.windowsazure.com

The screen that pops up is as shown in the following image. The account can be created using our existing Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo account.

Once logged in, you will be redirected to the following screen, where there is a list of services and applications on the left panel.

When you click on a category, its details are displayed on the screen. You can see the number of applications, virtual machine, mobile services and so on by clicking on the menu item.

The next chapter contains a detailed explanation of how to use this portal to manage Azure services.

Categorizing the services would help you understand Azure better. These categories are termed as ‘Components’ in this tutorial. The Individual components are explained with detailed pictures in subsequent chapters.

This is the interface for executing the application, which is one of the basic functions of Azure.

As seen in the above image, there are different models such as Web App, Virtual Machine, Mobile Service, Cloud Service, and Batch Service. These models can be used either separately or in combination as per the requirement.

Data management can be done by using SQL server Database component or the simple data storage module offered by Windows Azure. SQL server database can be used for relational database. The storage module can store unrelated tables (without foreign key or any relation) and blobs. Blobs include binary data in the form of images, audio, video, and text files.

Azure traffic manager routes the requests of a user intelligently to an available datacenter. The process involves finding the nearest datacenter to the user who makes the request for web application, and if the nearest datacenter is not available due to various reasons, the traffic manager deviates the request to another datacenter. However, rules are set by the owner of the application as to how a traffic manager should behave.

The virtual network is another feature that is part of networking in services offered by Windows Azure. The virtual network allows a network between local machines at your premise and virtual machine in Azure Datacenter. IPs to virtual machines can be assigned in a way that makes them appear to be residing in your own premise. The virtual network is set up using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) device.

The following image shows how these two features actually look in Azure portal.

The large amount of data can be stored and managed using Windows Azure. Azure offers HDInsight which is Hadoop-based service. Organizations often need to manage large amount of data which is necessarily not relational database management. Hadoop is a prominent technology used these days. Thus, Azure offers Hadoop service on their platform for clients.

The term ‘Big Compute’ refers to high performing computations. This is achieved by executing code on many machines at the same time.

Windows Azure offers two options for handling the interactions between two apps. One falls under storage component of the service and is called 'Message Queues'. The other one comes under the app service and is called 'Service Bus'. The messages can be sent to initiate communication among different components of an application or among different applications using these two options.

Microsoft Azure offers two kinds of caching which are in-memory Caching and Content Delivery Network (CDN) for caching frequently accessed data and improves the application performance. CDN is used to cache the blob data that will be accessed faster by users around the world.

This component is about management of users, authentication and authorization. Active directory stores the information of users accessing the application and also the organization’s information. It can synchronize with the related information on local machines residing on premises. Multifactor Access (MFA) service is built to address the security concerns such as only the right user can access the application.

Windows Azure offers a very easy platform to develop mobile application. You can simply start using mobile development tools after logging into your account. You don’t have to write big custom codes for the mobile application if you use this service. The push notifications can be sent, data can be stored and users can be authenticated in very less time.

The site recovery service replicates the data at secondary location as well as automates the process of recovery of data in case of data outage. Similarly Azure backup can be used to backing up the on premise data in clouds. Data is stored in encrypted mode in both the cases. Windows Azure offers a very effective and reliable backup service to clients and ensures they don’t face inconvenience in case of hardware failures.

This service addresses multiple concerns related to uploading media and making it available to end users easily. Users can manage tasks related to the media like encoding, ad insertion, streaming, etc. easily.

Windows Azure offers the opportunity to users to buy or sell applications and data through their platform. The applications are put in the marketplace or Azure store from where they can be accessed and bought by other users.

Azure applications can be produced by the developers in various programming languages. Microsoft currently provides language-specific SDKs for Java. NET, PHP, Node.js, Ruby, and Python. There is also a general Windows Azure SDK that supports language, such as C++.

In the last chapter, we explained how to create an Azure account. In this chapter, you will find step by step explanation of each component −

Step 1 − First, login in to your Azure account.

Step 2 − Click ‘New’ at the left bottom corner and drag your cursor to ‘Compute‘.

Now you will see a list of models under Compute Model as shown in the following image.

Step 1 − Click Web App.

Step 2 − Click Quick Create and enter the URL and choose a service plan from the dropdown list as shown in the following image.

When you go back to the main screen, it will show the website just created. And when you click the website URL, it will take you to the website.

The following image shows how your website will look when you click the URL.

Similarly, you can choose ‘From Gallery’ when creating a web app instead of ‘Quick Create’. This will let you choose the development framework in which you want to create your app.

Windows Azure supports .Net, Java, PHP, Python, Node.js and Ruby. There are several ways of publishing the code to Azure server. It can be published using FTP, FTPs, Microsoft Web Deploy technology. Various source control tools such as GitHub, Dropbox and Codeplex can also be used to publish the code. It provides a very interactive interface to keep track of changes that have been published already and also unpublished changes.

Step 1 − Click on ‘Virtual Machine’ from the list.

Step 2 − Then click ‘From Gallery’.

Step 3 − Choose the Operating System or Program you want to run.

Step 4 − Choose the configuration and fill in the details.

The Username and Password you set up here will be needed to access the virtual machine every time.

On the next two screens you can leave the default values on for the first time.

Step 5 − The virtual machine just created will be displayed when you click on ‘Virtual Machine’ on the left panel as shown in following image. It might take a few minutes to show up.

Step 6 − Once the machine is created you can connect to it by clicking on the connect icon displayed at the bottom of the screen. It will save a .rpd file on your machine as shown in the following image. Chose ‘save file’ on the screen and it will save in ‘downloads’ or the in the set location on your machine.

Step 7 − Open that .rpd file and you can connect to the VM by filling in the credentials into the following screen.

You can also use your own image by capturing the image of an existing virtual machine or virtual hard drive. Virtual machines are beneficial in several ways.

A user can try new operating system without actually installing them.

A VM can be deleted when you are done with the operating system.

New versions of an operating system can be tried and tested before the user installs them on the machine.

VM provides a very economical and hassle free way of using a development framework or a tool that runs on specific version of OS.

Mobile services compute hosting model is optimized to provide a cloud backend for applications that run on mobile devices. For creating a mobile service −

Step 1 − Select Mobile services under Compute and click on create. A new window will be open as shown in the following image.

Step 2 − Fill in the URL. Select the database, region and backend.

Step 3 − Tick the check box if you want to configure the advance push settings. This option allows us to configure our Mobile Service to use an existing notification hub or specify the name of a new one. If you leave this checkbox unmarked, a new hub will be created in a new namespace with a default name.

Batch service is needed when a large scale application is run and a parallel high performing computing is required. The developers can create batches to run a task parallel that eases the workload at no extra cost. Azure charges for only the virtual machines which are being used. They can schedule a task, put them in queues and manage the workload in cloud. Batch creation does not involve setting up a separate VM, cluster or job scheduling.

To creating a batch service follow the similar steps for creating other services under Compute model. The following image shows how a batch service can be created quickly.

Once you have created a batch service, you can see the details by selecting it from the left panel. The following image pops up on the screen.

Fabric Controller is a significant part of Windows Azure architecture. When thinking of the components or services provided by Windows Azure, we wonder how all this works and what is happening in clouds. It seems very complex from our end. Let us look into the physical architecture of these services to have a better understanding of Fabric Controller.

Inside the datacenter, there are many machines or servers aggregated by a switch. We can say that fabric controller is a brain of the azure service that analyses the processes and makes decisions. Fabrics are group of machines in Microsoft’s datacenter which are aggregated by a switch. The group of these machines is called cluster. Each cluster is managed and owned by a fabric controller. They are replicated along with these machines. It manages everything inside those machines, for e.g. load balancers, switches, etc. Each machine has a fabric agent running inside it and fabric controller can communicate with each fabric agent.

When selecting a virtual machine offered by Windows Azure services, there are five options to choose from. The configuration is as follows −