Microsoft Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform which enables rapid development of great solutions using its compute, storage, network and application services. The presentation focuses on how to get started with Azure and on fundamentals of some of the core features of Azure which every developer needs to know like Virtual Machines, SQL Database, App Services, Storage accounts and so on. The session will also include some quick demos, best practices, and tips for Azure Development. There will be something for everyone who is looking for advancing their technical skills with Microsoft Azure.

1. Microsoft Azure Essentials
- for developers
VAIBHAV GUJRAL
@VABGUJRAL

2. About Me
Vaibhav Gujral
http://vaibhavgujral.wordpress.com
Twitter: @vabgujral
GitHub: vabgujral
Skype: vaibhav.gujral
gujral.vaibhav@hotmail.com
 Technical architect with 10+ years of
extensive experience in designing,
architecting, developing and delivering
enterprise class applications.
 Building Azure Solutions since 2010
 Full Stack Developer. Key skills include
.Net technologies, AngularJS, SQL

3. Getting Started
with Microsoft
Azure
• WHAT IS AZURE?
• AZURE SERVICES
• SUBSCRIPTION MANAGEMENT
• BILLING
• AZURE PORTAL

4. What is cloud computing?
 Not new – extension to what existed before
 Provides a modern alternative to the traditional on-premises datacenter
 Pay-as-you-go model
 All resources are accessible over network
 Benefits includes - Cost, Speed, Global Scale, Productivity, Performance,
Reliability etc.
 Security Concerns

5. Cloud Deployment Models

6. Cloud Service Models

7. What is Microsoft Azure?
 Microsoft’s cloud computing platform
 Global Presence with 38 datacenters
 Seamless online portal experience
 Supports public, private and hybrid cloud models
 Azure supports IaaS and PaaS models – Office 365 is SaaS offering
 Azure Stack is Private cloud offering which is an add-on in Windows Server 2016

8. Global Presence

9. Azure Services
 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), 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.

10. Azure Services

11. Subscription Management
 To start with - sign up for a free trial at azure.microsoft.com – 200$ free credit for one month
 Activate the Azure benefits included in MSDN subscription
 Check out Purchase Options at https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/purchase-options/
 Check out Member Offers at https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/member-offers/
 Visual Studio Dev Essentials – 300$ credit for a year – 25$ per month

12. Billing/Pricing
 Pricing for Azure infrastructure can be estimated by using the pricing calculator found at
http://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/calculator/
 Most services are offered in – Basic, Standard and Premium tiers
 Each tier differ in price and performance levels
 To see current usage, click the Subscriptions tile in the Dashboard of the Azure portal
 Resource cost visible per resource
 Helpful in managing Azure costs

13. Azure Portal
 Build, manage, and monitor everything from simple web apps to complex cloud applications in
a single, unified console
 Currently two versions –
 Azure Portal - https://portal.azure.com
 Classic Portal - https://manage.windowsazure

14. Azure Portal - Demo

15. Management
Tools
• AZURE MANAGEMENT TOOLS
• DEMO

16. Azure Management Tools - Overview
 Tools to aid in the development and management of Azure solutions
 Microsoft Visual Studio
 Azure Powershell
 Azure cross-platform command-line (CLI)
 Azure SDK
 Azure Management REST APIs
 Feature Specific tools-
 Azure SQL Database – SQL Server Management Studio
 Azure Virtual Machines - Microsoft System Center, OMS, Puppet, Chef, Powershell DSC
 Azure Storage – Cloud Explorer (inside VS), AzCopy, Azure Storage Explorer
 Azure Service Bus – Service Bus Explorer

17. Azure Management - Demo

18. Azure
Deployment
Models
• CLASSIC MODEL (ASM)
• AZURE RESOURCE MANAGER (ARM)
• ARM VS CLASSIC MODEL

19. Classic Model - ASM
 Azure originally provided only the classic deployment model
 Each resource exists independently and cannot be grouped
 Manage resources in a coordinated approach
 Deploy/Delete all the resources in the correct order
 Tags are not supported

20. Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
 Resource manager provides template based repeatable deployment model for all Azure
resources
 Behaves as control planes for Azure services
 Within Resource Manager, resources can be grouped, deployed, managed and monitored as a
resource group
 Faster than classic Azure Service Management (ASM) model
 Reusable/linkable JSON template
 Mark one resource dependable on another
 Supports tagging of resources
 Microsoft recommends all the new Azure resources should be created using ARM

21. Resource Groups
 Under ARM, all the resources are grouped into a Resource Group
 All of the resources in a resource group share the same lifecycle
 A resource can only be assigned to one group at a time
 A resource can be added to or removed from a resource group at any time.
 Most types of resource can be moved to a different resource group at any time
 The resources in a resource group can be in different regions
 You can use a resource group to control access for the resources therein

22. Resource Providers
 Offers a set of resources and operations for working with an Azure service
 Microsoft.AppService
 Microsoft.AzureActiveDirectory
 Microsoft.Compute
 Microsoft.DocumentDB
 Microsoft.EventHub
 Microsoft.Sql
 Microsoft.Storage
 ….

23. Role based Access Control
 Fine-grained control over the operations and scope with which a user can perform an action
 Permissions at resource level against Co-administrators
 Supported roles-
 Owner
 Reader
 SQL DB contributor
 SQL Security Manager
 Storage Account Contributor
 VM Contributor
 Custom Roles
 Supports Service Principals

24. Resource Manager Template

25. Resource Manager Template

26. Azure Resource Manager - Demo

27. Azure App
Service
• APP SERVICE
• SERVICE PLANS
• WEB APPS DEMO
• CONFIGURING, SCALING
& MONITORING WEB APPS

28. Azure App Service

29. Azure App Service

30. App Service Plans
 An App Service plan defines the capacity and resources to be shared among one or more
app services that are assigned to that plan.
 The following are some of the criteria to be considered when creating an App Service plan.
 Location (such as West US)
 Instance count
 Pricing tier (such as Free, Standard, or Premium) providing distinct settings for a variety of performance
and service capabilities:
 Number of cores or instance size
 Amount of memory
 Amount of storage
 Maximum number of instances
 Autoscaling options (depends on tier—automatic, manual, or none)

31. Azure Web App
 Hosted in an Azure App Service
 Enables deployment of web applications quickly
 Supported languages include .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, and Python
 Available templates includes - WordPress, Umbraco, Joomla!, and Drupal
 Supports continuous deployment with Team Foundation Server (TFS), GitHub, TeamCity,
Jenkins, or BitBucket
 For diagnostics, provides performance statistics, application logging, web server logging, IIS
logs, and IIS Failed Request logs.
 Supports remote debugging using Visual Studio

32. Azure Web App - Demo

33. Azure Virtual
Machines
• INTRODUCTION TO AZURE VIRTUAL
MACHINES
• DEMO

34. Azure Virtual Machines - Overview
 IaaS offering – you own the VM – though it runs on Microsoft’s datacenter
 Supports Windows as well as Linux images
 Supports two types of disks-
 OS Disk – which holds OS and is required
 Data Disk – which holds data and is optional
 Ideal for workloads like Database Servers, Sharepoint servers, Identity Servers, Domain Controllers
 Lift and Shift on-premise workloads/VMs to Azure
 Charged hourly for the VM and storage charges for holding VHDs are extra
 Three status – Running, Stopped, Stopped (Deallocated)
 User powershell or CLI to stop a VM but keep it allocated

35. Virtual Machines - Demo

36. Azure Storage
• STORAGE ACCOUNTS
• Blobs
• Tables
• Queues
• Files
• DEMO

37. Azure Storage - Overview
 Microsoft-managed service providing durable, scalable, and redundant storage
 Includes following services-
 Blob Storage
 Table Storage
 Queue Storage
 File Storage

38. Storage Accounts
 Secure account to give access to Azure Storage services
 Unique namespace for storage resources
 Types of storage accounts-
 General-purpose storage accounts
 Blob storage accounts
 100 storage accounts per subscription
 Each storage account has 500TB of storage limit

39. Shared Access Signatures
 Provides controlled access to Azure storage resources
 A shared access signature (SAS) is a token that can be appended to a URL that enables
delegated access to a storage resource
 Anyone who possesses the token can access the resource it points to with the permissions it
specifies, for the period of time that it is valid
 Two types-
 Service SAS
 Account SAS

40. Redundancy options
 Protects data and preserves application up-time in the event of transient hardware failures
 Replication copies data, either within the same data center, or to a second data center
 Replication Types
 Locally-redundant storage (LRS)
 Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
 Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
 Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)

41. Azure Blob Storage
 Large amounts of unstructured object data
 Highly cost-effective and scalable
 Every blob is organized into a container
 http://<storage account>.blob.core.windows.net/<container>/<blob>
 Blob types includes-
 Block blobs
 Append blobs
 Page blobs
 Useful for storing media files like videos, audios, images
 Useful for back-up

42. Azure Table Storage
 Microsoft's NoSQL key/attribute store – schema-less design
 Highly available, massively scalable storage for structured data
 Collection of entities – where a collection of properties and their values comprise an entity
 http://<storage account>.table.core.windows.net/<table>
 Two entities in the same table can contain different collections of properties, and those
properties can be of different types
 An entity always has 3 properties – PartitionKey, RowKey and TimeStamp
 The combination of PartitionKey and RowKey should always be unique to serve as primary key
 All entities with same partition key are stored on same storage node
 RowKey denotes uniqueness within the partition
 Each entity can have 252 properties or key/value pairs

43. Azure Table Storage

44. Azure Storage Queues
 Reliable messaging solution for asynchronous communication
 Supports managing asynchronous tasks and building process workflows
 A message can be up to 64KB of size
 http://<storage account>.queue.core.windows.net/<queue>
 Time-to-live(TTL) for a message can be up to 7 days
 Maintains all server-side logs for all the transactions against the queue
 Preferable when queue size grows over 80 GB in size

45. Azure File Shares
 Cloud-based SMB file shares
 Idle for moving legacy applications to Azure that rely on file shares
 A virtual machine can mount a file share just as a desktop application mounts a typical SMB
share
 Based on SMB-3, it can be mounted on Windows VM across Azure regions or on-premise
 Accessible over REST API anywhere
 Maximum size can be up to 5 TB and each file can be of 1 TB maximum size
 Multiple VMs can share same Azure File Share

46. Azure Storage - Demo

47. SQL Database
• INTRODUCTION TO SQL
DATABASE
• SQL SERVER IN A VM
• DEMO

48. Azure SQL Database - Overview
 Managed Cloud Database as a Service
 Based on SQL Server Engine
 Each database in Azure SQL Database is associated with a logical server
 Scale on the fly
 It can be
 A single database with its own set of resources (DTUs)
 Part of an elastic pool that shares a set of resources (eDTUs)

49. Azure SQL Database – Size Chart

50. Azure SQL Database – Elastic Pool
 Simple, cost-effective solution for managing and scaling multiple databases that have varying
and unpredictable usage demands
 The databases in an elastic pool are on a single Azure SQL Database server and share a set
number of resources at a set price
 Optimizes the price performance for a group of databases within a prescribed budget while
delivering performance elasticity for each database.
When to consider a pool?
 Well suited for a large number of databases with low average utilization with relatively
infrequent utilization spikes
 The more the number of databases added to a pool the greater are the savings

51. Azure SQL Database
 On-premise SQL Server database need some re-engineering before migrating from on premise
to Azure SQL Database
 Does not supports Windows Authentication, but supports Azure Active Directory authentication
 Unsupported features includes – Always On Availaibility Groups, BACKUP, CLR, Database
Mirroring, Database Snapshots, SSIS, SSRS, SSAS, etc.
 Complete list is here
 Unsupported T-SQL statements includes – HAS_DBACCESS, sp_configure, EXECUTE AS LOGIN,
fn_get_sql, etc.
 Complete list is here
 T-SQL debugging is not supported
Differences with On-premise SQL Server

52. Azure SQL Database - Demo

53. SQL Server in a VM
 Useful when SQL Database doesn’t offers the required features
 Things to consider while opting for SQL server on a VM:
 Pricing might includes OS license cost, SQL Server license cost
 You can bring your own licenses
 Pricing also includes Azure Storage cost which is used for storing VHDs
 At Least DS2 VM for standard edition
 At least DS3 VM for Enterprise edition
 Azure will offer high availability of VM overall but not the SQL Server instance
 Choose SQL Server in a VM if high level of control is desired
 Also useful for lift-and-shift database migrations
 Consider other databases to bring down the costs – MySQL is available on Azure

54. SQL Server in a VM - Demo

55. Q&A

56. References • MICROSOFT AZURE ESSENTIALS:
FUNDAMENTALS OF AZURE