I am creating a WebService with C# Core 3.0 that is using MySQL and Redis, but I am not so familiar with Azure so I need advice about configuring everything.
I had MySQL hosted on AWS, but I am transferring it to Azure because I think that performance (speed) will be better on Azure because they will be on same data center. Right?
But, on my MySQL page Host is like '*.mysql.database.azure.com'. That means that every connection will go out of Azure, and than come back? I don't have some local IP for connection? Same question for Redis.
Do I need to configure some local network on Azure and will that impact speed on the app? And, is MySQL a good choice for Azure or should I try with another one?
I am just reading about Azure Virtual Networks. But as I understand it, VN's sole purpose is to isolate elements from the outside network?
You will get better performance if your my-sql instance and your app service are in the same region (basically the same data centre).
The connection string is mysql.database.azure.com, but remember the connection will be a TCP/IP connection, so the DNS lookup will realise that this address mysql.database.azure.com is in the same region (same data center). Then the TCP/IP connection will go to an internal IP.
You could use tcpping in your app service's kudo console to try this and see the result.
The basic rule is that you should group your app and database in the same region for better performance and cheaper cost (as Microsoft doesn't charge traffic within the same region).
Azure Virtual network is for a different purpose. For example, if you have some on premise database servers and you want to call these servers from azure, then VM could be helpful. But for the scenario you described, it is not really needed.
The company I work for has Microsoft azure support included, and if you or your company have support contract with them, you can raise questions directly to them and get really quick responses.
Related
We have an application running in Azure that consists of the following:
A Web App front end, which talks to…
A WebApi running as a Web App as well, which can (as well as a couple other services) talk to…
A Cloud Service load balanced set of VMs which Are hosting an Elasticsearch cluster.
Additionally we have the scenario were dev’s whitelist their IPs so that their localhost version of the API can hit the VMs as well.
We have locked down our Elasticsearch VM’s by adding ACLs to the exposed end point. I whitelisted the outbound IPs that were listed on my App Services. I was under the mistaken impression that these were unique to my Api. It turns out that these are shared across the scale unit in Azure. Other services running in the same scale unit, could, if they knew the endpoint, access the data exposed on the endpoint in my cluster. I need to lock this down, and I am trying to find the easiest way. These are the things I am looking at, and I would appreciate advice and/or redirection.
Elastic Shield: Not being considered. This is a product by Elastic
that is designed to secure ES. This is ideal, but at the moment it
is out of scope (due to the cost and overhead)
List item
Elastic plugins: Not being considered. The main plugins (such as
Jetty) appear to be abandoned.
Azure VPN. I originally tried to set this up, but ran into too many
difficulties. The ACLs seemed to give me what I need without much
difficulty. I am not sure if I can set this up now. The things I
don’t know are:
I don’t think I can move existing VMs into a new VPN.
I think you have to recreate the VMs in that VPN from the get go
Could I move my Web App into the VPN? How does that work?
This would prob break my developer scenario as the localhost API
would not be able to access the VPN, right?
Add a certificate to requests: It would be ideal if I could have
requests require a cert or a header token. I assume to do this I
would need to create a proxy that would run on the VMs and do the
validation before forwarding the request on to my Elasticsearch.
Anything else? Is there another option I have not thought of?
Thanks!
~john
You can create a VPN point-to-site connecting your Web App with your IaaS VMs. This is the best solution because you will be able to use just internal IPs on your IaaS.
The easiest way to do that using Azure Portal is create a Web App and, create a new VPN and VNet using "setup" option at "Your Web App" -> Settings -> Networking -> VNET Integration -> Setup -> Create New Virtual Network.
After that, create your IaaS inside this new VNet.
You also can create a ARM template to create Web App, IaaS, VPN and everything that you need. Take a look at my ARM template to create PHP+MySQL using Web App and MariaDB Cluster connected by VPN: https://github.com/juliosene/azure-webapp-php-mariadb
We're having some issues with Azure Sql Databases, and their host name from sp_who reports back something like 'RD000xxxxxxx' for the hostname.
How can you determine the app service that is connecting to the database from this hostname?
RD000* is the VM hostname if not set explicitly. If you have the access to your deployments, you may be able to check it using APIs (or in case of VM RDP for example). If you suspect that it is not from your deployment, then, i strongly suspect, there is no way to detect who is it (perhaps, technical support may, but i doubt). With some possibility, it will change as well.
I've found it, but not through the management api or the portals.
https://[your-app-name].scm.azurewebsites.net/Env
It's under Machine Name.
I am new to Azure and just trying to get my head around some things.
I have a web app running locally that now connects to a windows azure SQL database. I want to move my local web app into an azure web role. I have two questions:
Do I need to change my connection string or does it just work?
I am assuming windows azure is smart enough to now know that they are both hosted on azure so each request no longer needs to go over the internet?
Cheers
Do I need to change my connection string or does it just work?
No, this is still that same connection string.
I am assuming windows azure is smart enough to now know that they are both hosted on azure so each request no longer needs to go over the internet?
You're both web site and SQL Azure database will be in Azure data center. It depends in which region your web site and database will be. If they are in the same region you'll have low latencies because it will be in the same data center, however if they are in two different regions, then at one point it has to go through connections between data centers called backbones. Even if those are special very fast connections you'll notice higher latencies.
http://www.azurespeed.com/ web site allows you to check what are the latencies between Azure data centers. This gives you a kind of idea.
Answer 1 : Since you are already connecting to SQL azure from local,
you don't need to change the connection string.
Answer 2: If both your Web Role, and SQL azure are in same Geo
Location (say SoutCentral US) then there will not be much internet
traffic, but it will use azure's network to communicate.
I have a azure cloud service (a server) where i host a Redis database. I also have a web site hosted in azure web sites. I want the web site to be able to talk to the Redis DB on port 6379. I know I can configure a public endpoint for that port on my server but that would open it for whole Internet. I want it opened only for azure web sites (or even better, only for my web site). How can i do this?
Windows Azure Web Sites is in an isolation bubble separate from your Cloud Services and there's no way to bridge that gap. Ideally you'd do this by connecting the web site machine to other Azure services via a Virtual Network, but this FAQ confirms you can't do that right now:
Can I use Windows Azure websites with Virtual Network?
No. We do not support websites with virtual networks.
Opening Redis up over the internet shouldn't even be considered as it doesn't have the kind of security you'd want out of the box to be opening up its port publicly as it is meant to be co-located with your application, so you really wouldn't want to do that. Never mind the added network overhead which will eat into the performance you expect to get by leveraging something like Redis anyway.
I believe your best bet given your current configuration is to add a Web Role that's part of the same Azure Cloud Service and run your web based application out of that so that it can communicate with worker role. It only requires a little bit of configuration to get this going (i.e. adding an InternalEndpoint to the Redis Worker Role). While I realize Web Roles don't offer as frictionless a development model as Web Sites, you have to choose the right tool for the job.
Another option, if you want to setup your Redis on a VM instead of tying it to the Cloud Service directly, is that you can setup a Virtual Network, put the Redis VM on the virtual network and then configure the Cloud Service so that it's part of the same affinity group and add the NetworkConfiguration/VirtualNetworkSite configuration section to the Cloud Service's .cscfg.
Which approach makes more sense all depends on how you leverage your Redis instance, but the main benefit of the latter approach is that the Redis instance is not recreated each time you deploy your Cloud Service and, so, any data that's in it will stay available between deployments. Another benefit is if you want to build and leverage a Redis cluster across multiple Cloud Services this enables you to do that.
We integrate with a third-party service where we can run queries which is right now secured using HTTPS encryption and username/password. We send our queries from a service running on the Windows Azure cloud.
The third-party provider wants to migrate towards better security and they have asked us to either
Setup a VPN - which is problematic because for we'd need to use Azure Connect and they'd have to install the client endpoint service on their part.
Provide some IP address where the queries will come from so they can filter out anyone else at the firewall level - which is problematic because AFAIK you cannot fix the IP addresses of the Windows Azure Compute nodes.
Suggest another secure alternative - the only thing I could think of is to set up the VPN with them on a non-Azure server and then tunnel the requests through using Azure Connect - which is obviously extra work for us and also defeats the point of hosting the service on a cloud if it depends on a non-cloud service.
Any ideas?
Can they install the Azure Connect endpoint on another server on their DMZ network? i.e. not the actual server which hosts their service?
Can we somehow provide them with static IPs for incoming queries?
Any other solution that is scalable?
Thanks
If I understand the scenario correctly, your Azure service is a client to a 3rd party service. This scenario may be solved through the use of the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus. You would need to install a proxy app in the 3rd party's datacenter that would be responsible for establishing the connection to the service bus. The connection comes from inside the 3rd party's datacenter, so no new incoming holes in the firewall. The connection can handle WCF connections with all its security strengths, and users can be authenticated with ACS.
Here is a starting point: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee732537.aspx
There is a hands on lab in the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit that explains most of the details that you'll need.
IMHO, HTTPS is already very good; and I don't exactly see how a VPN would make the system any more secure. In particular, VPN is no silver bullet, if your VM is compromised then the VPN connection is compromised too (same for HTTPS). On the other hand, the IP restriction would indeed reduce the attack surface.
Then, using a server outside the cloud is a poor idea indeed. Not only it defeats most of the benefits of the cloud (been there, done that and suffered a lot), but also it also makes the whole thing less secure with more complexity and more attack surface.
Windows Azure does not provide anything that look like a static IP at this point. In our experience, IP addresses for a given service change once in a while even if the service is only upgraded (and never deleted). Static IP addresses have been an important feature request for a long time, Microsoft will probably provide it at some point, but it might still take many months.