This article discusses that an Azure function can easily be deployed in local datacenters without Azure.
Open source runtime that runs anywhere
The Functions runtime, templates, UI and underlying WebJobs SDK are all open source projects being developed publically. The Azure Function runtime will be portable so you can run Functions anywhere - on Azure, in your datacenter or other clouds.
Question:
How can I create an installer package that I can give to customers?
What are the requirements of this installer?
Can the target environment be ASP.NET core or run on Linux/Mac?
Azure Functions Runtime (currently in preview) enables an on premise deployment of Azure Functions, which includes portal, functions execution runtime and other components, all in an installer you can use. This also removes some of the cloud dependencies like Azure Storage, allowing you to run all within your internal network.
Currently, .NET Core is not supported, so you'll need to deploy this on a Windows environment, but we're actively working on migrating the core Azure Functions runtime bits and the on premise Azure Functions Runtime would follow.
You can find the requirements on the document I've linked to.
Another option is do download the functions releases directly from the repository here, but that does not have an installer that enables an end-to-end deployment experience (or components like the portal), so you'd need to provide that.
Related
So I am using Azure Functions at work and thought I would have a play and install them on my own server. I have successfully installed Azure Functions Runtime 2 (preview).
I have then followed the Java tutorial to create an Azure Function :
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-create-first-java-maven
How do I then deploy this function to my own Azure functions server?
In the guide it says about using :
az login
mvn azure-functions:deploy
Unfortunately, mvn azure-functions:deploy is to deploy functions to Azure site as az login is required before deployment, which doesn't support deployment to on-premises Runtime portal.
But the key point is, the on-premises Runtime is obsolete(one year behind the latest bits), new project probably can't work with it even if we find how to publish.
Since v2 becomes GA, it is recommended to leverage custom image for usages out of Azure box.
Update
Missed one point. As AF Team answered in the issue you post, no Java Image for now so the usage of Azure Java Function outside Azure is blocked unless we could figure out creating the image on our own.
I am a software vendor with a .net web solution that I want customers to be able to easily install / deploy into Azure Web Web Apps / Azure Websites along with a Sql Azure backend. I can't find any installer tool that supports this scenario. I have also looked into the Azure Marketplace but it seems the only option there is to create VM images. I want my customer's to avoid having to deploy to an manage VMs and adopt the IaaS model. Instead they should be able to install to Azure Web Apps with a package that copies all the web solution files and installs and connects the Azure Sql. Is this possible or will I have to manually deploy and configure Azure solution for each customer?
You can use the VS Marketplace to do the deployment. What you need is to create an ARM template. There is a huge number of samples here: https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates - you can pick one of the web app ones - for example: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/templates/201-web-app-sql-database/ - has a SQL database linked to a web app.
The ARM template allows you to do a "no-hands" deployment of the resources and know when they are ready for further action. You can also deploy from any of the supported continuous deployment options (see the template with a GitHub connection as an example) or you can use ftp/msdeploy after the deployment is successful.
This is a good tutorial https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/vs-azure-tools-resource-groups-deployment-projects-create-deploy
This is the github example mentioned in previous answer
https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/tree/master/201-web-app-github-deploy
I am currently looking into using ARM to deploy new environments of our Azure Components. We have a lot of web apis that are deployed to Cloud Services, since we need access to the underlying OS to get CPU usage for App Dynamics metrics. When reading through ARM, it seems as if they are deprecating Cloud Services, but I have some confusion about what is replacing it. I see that you can create Web Apps using this and use Publish from Visual Studio to deploy the app it, but I see no options for Cloud Services. So what is the preferred method to do this? Creating a VM and deploying using Web Deploy? What about VM scaling. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
My company is in the process of moving a legacy app to Azure using Cloud Services and we were concerned about the future of Cloud Services. Since we are somewhat early into the project and would like to use the ARM model we thought it would be easier to make a move now if we knew the future. After a few conversations with project leads at Microsoft on this topic we were only told that we should continue working with Cloud Services as they would continue to be supported.
It's quite clear that the move to ARM was not well thought out in terms of direction and consequences of existing services that many people are already using. Reading between the lines I would say that there is no plan to convert Cloud Services from the ASM to ARM model.
If application insights (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/application-insights/) are sufficient for your monitoring needs, then you can use web apps. These can be deployed via ARM, and can automatically deploy from a git repo or web deploy package. See this example:
https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/tree/master/201-web-app-github-deploy
The issue here that you may be trying to do operations which are restricted by the web app sandbox.
Failing that, you can use an ARM template to set up a VM and then invoke a custom site extension which will run powershell code to do further provisioning. This powershell code can fetch any package that you may want to install. See this ARM template for example: https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/tree/9ad72f1f5f0008c14311be79eee036b871712394/201-list-storage-keys-windows-vm
Once the VM is created you would be able to modify it and scale as needed.
I have a Worker Role that need complex environment settings (install a couple of softwares, setup some directories and etc) so I want to deploy it to VM ( instead of Cloud Service that specialize in more simple environment without pre configure settings).
The problem that I can only publish to Cloud Service (from VS 2013), am I missing something ?
I tried to find some article and relevant materiel about deploy a Worker Role to a VM and the only things I found is related to the Cloud Service.
How can I do it ?
(or provide me a general guidelines)
Simply put, you can't deploy a Worker Role as is into an Azure Virtual Machine (IaaS) without doing code changes.
Things you could do:
Isolate your business logic into a separate DLL and then create a separate Windows Service project which consumes this DLL. Then you could deploy that Windows Service into a VM. Do note that your business logic DLL should not have references to any libraries which will only run in Cloud Services kind of environment (e.g. Diagnostics, ServiceRuntime etc.)
Do take a look at Startup Tasks for Cloud Services. They do provide a mechanism to perform additional tasks like installing software when your Cloud Service is deployed.
I got a cloud service (worker role) which I want to deploy to a beta and a production environment.
It seems a waste to have to create three projects (one with the actual implementation and two for deployment).
Is it possible to create two deployment profiles which links to different Azure destinations but uses the same worker role project?
This is very simple to do. Just build your Azure package without deploying, and keep your dev/beta/prod settings in the Service Configuration, not embedded anywhere like web.config/app.config. Then store both the deployment package and configuration in blob storage (speeding up deployment). You'll want multiple configuration files: one for each environment, each stored separately in blob storage.
Once this is done, you can just deploy the package to multiple cloud services, each with a different configuration file. This can be done either through the portal or through PowerShell / CLI.
If you've been deploying directly from Visual Studio, it might not seem quite as obvious. But from VS, you can build a package without actually deploying.