If you have a Virtual Machine you are required to apply patches every Patch Tuesday and ensure the OS is up to date to prevent security issues.
If you get a PAAS Azure WebApp do Microsoft take care of patching the underlying OS?
If so would you see downtime when this happens? Or are all the apps on that Host OS moved to another Host in some way?
For the first question, that is kind of the point of PaaS. Azure takes care of the patches for the OS.
As for an answer to your other questions, this GitHub issue is quite good: https://github.com/Azure/app-service-announcements/issues/63.
Most updates can be performed without affecting your services running on the platform’s infrastructure. For this update, you’ll notice a restart of your web apps, the same that takes place during our regular monthly OS update. Our goal is to avoid service interruptions and, as with every upgrade to the service, we will be monitoring the health of the platform during the rollout.
Your apps are moved to another update domain transparently while the patch is applied to the update domain that hosted your app. It does cause an app restart of course.
Take a look a the blog we just published describing what goes on behind App Service updates - https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/appserviceteam/2018/01/18/demystifying-the-magic-behind-app-service-os-updates/
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In order to avoid doing some overhead work, I decide to use a work-around to upgrade my VM from server 2016 to 2019. The work around was successful and everything is running fine. One hiccup though is that I still see the plan being set to "2016-Datacenter".
(Correct me if I am wrong) So far doing some digging I see that this is set at the create time of the VM; it corresponds to the sku of the image used to build the VM.
My question is, are there any gotchas if the VM is running server 2019 but the plan is set to "2016-Datacenter"
Plan information is metadata Microsoft uses to track Marketplace offers. If you want to create an image in a shared gallery, using a source that was originally created from an Azure Marketplace image like this, you may need to keep track of purchase plan information. You may face issues when you create a VM from the Azure Marketplace image if there is wrong plan information. Read here for more details.
We are able to do an Azure VM in-place upgrade to Windows Server 2019. Here is the step by step process to update the IaaS VM Windows server to Windows Server 2019 for your reference.
However, it's not recommended to do because Microsoft does not support an upgrade of the operating system of an Azure VM.. It prefers to use a clean uninstallation and installation. To work around this issue, create an Azure VM that's running a supported version of an operating system, and then migrate the workload.
As I see I need to create new linux app service.
Recreate domain, certificates binding and deployment pipeline.
And then remove old one.
Is it simplier way to do this?
As Jim Xu mentioned it is currently not possible to move the WebApp from Windows based to Linux. You may have to redeploy the App, leverage the same code with slight modifications and configuration changes as per the requirement.
Cloning feature is not available at the time of this writing. Also, currently there is a limitation - You cannot create a Linux Web App in an App Service plan already hosting non-Linux Web Apps.
Copying the Uservoice post here for clarity & convenience:
" Unfortunately we can’t provide this feature as there are too many internal dependencies for the underlying OS that would make this complex and potentially breaking for solutions. There definitely could be languages that might be supported but they would an edge case."
We really appreciate your feedback/suggestion, so kindly up-vote the Uservoice post -All of the feedback you share there will be monitored and reviewed by the Microsoft engineering teams responsible for building Azure.
I am looking at possibly running some of our business on Azure.
I am trying to pick the services that would work best for my company, but I am getting mixed signals.
Because I am starting a new system, I want to pick the offerings that are not "legacy" (aka "current"). But there seems to be no way straight forward way to know that.
For example, this page of the Microsoft Documentation says
Cloud Services is similar to Service Fabric in degree of control versus ease of use, but it’s now a legacy service and Service Fabric is recommended for new development.
This page clearly states that Cloud Services is "legacy". However, you would never know this by going to the Cloud Services overview page. It has great marketing material that sells Cloud Services as a great option. But if I picked it, then I would be starting out on a platform that is in a legacy status.
Now I know that about Cloud Services vs Service Fabric. But there are tons offerings on Azure. I am trying to research them one by one to find out which ones are the most recent incarnation, but I feel like I am wasting my time.
Another example is storage. Lucky for me an Azure MVP answered my question on this one. Apparently, there is "older storage account" based disks and "managed" disks. Turns out managed disks are the new, easy way to do things. The storage account is harder. Still available, but not really what a new user should be picking. But again, this is very hard to find out unless someone who has been working with this stuff for a long time tells you.
I was about to start in on App Services and Web Apps, but I thought I would ask first to see if I am doing research that is already done and posted out there.
Is there somewhere that shows the current list of Azure services that you should look at if you are starting a new project?
I asked the similar question almost a year ago, and I even spoke with Azure Support Team after that. At that time, Microsoft did not officially state Cloud Service is legacy.
Does Azure App Service/Web App replace Azure Cloud Service?
We have been hosting our enterprise applications in Cloud Service since 2013, and a couple of them are in App Service. Here is my thought -
4 years ago we only have Cloud Service - Web Role and Worker Role,and App Service (formally named as Web App) is not fully ready for enterprise applications yet. Since App Service came up, Microsoft heavily promote App Service compare to Cloud Service. In addition, what I notice is Cloud Service did not get new features like App Service.
Service Fabric is quite new, and it doesn't have all the belts and whistles like App Service, so we might have to wait a bit for enterprise applications.
Only advantage of Cloud Service is you can remote desktop to a role instance, after the application is deployed.
If I host a new application in Azure today, I'll definitely use App Service.
Microsoft has published a list of Azure reference architectures. It was last updated in November 2016. You can browse it here, and there is some guidance given. But for example, you mentioned using Service Fabric (which is a great way to go for a robust app that really needs to scale), but Service Fabric isn't mentioned in the aforementioned resource.
I spend a lot of time running down Azure resources in relation to web applications (not to be confused with App Service Web Apps), and I have not found a definitive source of the type of info you're looking for personally.
Does windows Azure supports windows Services ?, ...
I develop an application that has among its components a windows service that every hour sends an email with information.
Is this supported in Windows Azure?,
Thanks!!
You might find the worker role is a better fit for running a process every hour. If you have the code for the WIndows Service it should not be hard to impleemnt it in a worker role.
You will, however, have to use a 3rd party service to send the email, as this is not supported in Azure.
Regards,
Alan
Yes, you can do this*. In order to install a Windows Service in a PaaS worker role (or web role), you will need to create a startup script that installs the service on boot (and checks to see if already installed on subsequent boots).
If you are using IaaS VMs, then the installation is straightforward - just do as you do today.
*Windows Azure Websites is a shared model, so installing services is not supported there.
To combine both Alan Smith's and dunnry's answers, both are correct -
You can install a windows services on a PaaS role using a startup script (other than web sites).
If you're using a Virtual Machine you just install the service on the VM
But Alan is completely correct that the best route forward in most cases is migrating the code to a worker role which is usually quite straight forward, would work best and would be easier to maintain.
Having said all of that - sending emails from within Azure is not necessarily a good idea as many mail servers black list the ips (turns out Azure is a great platform for spammers)
I want to make an extra addition to Alan and Yossi's answers. It's important to know the why, because simply installing the Windows Service shouldn't be a problem.
But if you do this you'll be missing out on something very important. If you run all of your code in the actual Worker Role process you'll get the monitoring for free. This means, if your process crashes for whatever reason, Windows Azure will restart the instance to make sure the process gets back online.
Now if you simply go and install a Windows Service through a startup script you won't be able to take advantage from this automated monitoring. You'll need to make sure you have some kind of recovery (this could be a setting on the Windows Service or a different process). But it's simply too much work for something you could get for free.
I would suggest using a Extra-Small VM using a windows template that is already offered. It's the same cost as the worker role and will let you provision your service without any issues. You would install your service the same as you would on any on premises server.
If you don't need to have the same sort of failover scenario that your web roles do then this s a good option.
I am looking at migrating a dotnetnuke website to Azure. I need both staging and production versions of the site to be running.
I have looked at using Azure Websites, but at the moment there is no support for SSL on custom domains so this can't be used for the production website. I have migrated the staging site to an Azure Website and now have numerous options for publishing updates (ftp, git, using web matrix).
Due to the constraints of Azure Websites, I used the DNN Accelerator to create a cloud service for the production environment. This set up will allow me to have control over IIS and therefore manage SSL certificates (I think).
The problem I have with this is there does not seem to be any publishing options. The only way I can publish is by connecting to the Azure instance via RDP and then copying the website files onto the files system.
Are there any other ways of publishing? I have looked at converting the website to a WAP, but I believe this has implications when it comes to updating to new DNN versions.
You should never publish your application through RDP since these changes are non-persistent (meaning what you published might disappear after a hardware failure / ...). Adding new instances would also mean that these instances don't have the files you published before.
I suggest you start by looking at the DotNetNuke Azure Accelerator first. If this doesn't fit your needs you might always try to build something yourself, but if you want to say with a regular website and not a web application I wouldn't count on Visual Studio support. In that case you might want to look at creating a package from the command line and using startup scripts to add your website in IIS.
Sounds like you need to use a Start-up task to install the files in the correct place for a Web Role (Cloud Service) Smarx has a nice overview here, MSDN has a wealth of info too http://blog.smarx.com/posts/introduction-to-windows-azure-startup-tasks
Another option is IAAS for Azure with a persisted VM, more work mind you, Cloud Service would be the most efficient and correct solution...