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.
Related
App services have a good integration with application insights. Request can be traced from the caller through the dependencies across service boundaries.
This is not available by default with AKS.
I am trying to use this lab .
https://azure.github.io/kube-labs/5-aks-appinsights.html#objective-of-the-lab
Although when I reach the third step which is to execute init.sh,it gives me error.
ERROR: After approving csr app-monitoring-webhook.kube-system, the signed certificate did not appear on the resource. Giving up after 10 attempts.
I have modified the init.sh.
Changed apiVersion: certificates.k8s.io/v1 from v1beta1.
Used this link: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/certificate-signing-requests/#kubernetes-signers
Still getting this error.Is there any other way to link app insights with aks?
I am doing this for a .net core project.
[I'm from Application Insights team]
We're actively investing into providing similar experience for AKS as we do for App Services (glad that the latter is working for you!). Unfortunately, above lab is a few years old and based on private preview bits. We'll try to update this lab.
One option which is available today (and many AKS customers use it) is to instrument with Application Insights .NET SDK. Essentially you'll get exactly the same experience as with App Services (all incoming/outgoing requests will be auto-discovered and collected).
We have a bunch of Windows Services. We need to be able to continue to deploy our code as Windows service on premise, but would like to deploy to Azure where appropriate. The goal is to manage less infrastructure. I'm not keen on deploying dozens of bits an pieces as Azure Functions, but not entirely opposed to it either. Azure Batch / Webjobs are also another option. However, the long term goal is to move all of our services over to an orchestration server like Service Fabric so that all the services can be deployed and orchestrated from the one place. This is mainly a deployment consideration.
We will break the existing C# code in to .NET Core class libraries and reference them from either Service Fabric hosted in Azure, on-premise Service Fabric, or on-premise Windows Service. Is Service Fabric an appropriate choice? Or, is there a strong reason to run background jobs as Azure Batch / Functions / Webjobs?
This is Microsoft's diagram from here:
The answer to the question is that we don't really need full fledged orchestration right now, but it will become more important moving in to future. I have to balance being able to deploy all our code in one hit with the ease of ad hoc deployment that Azure Functions offer.
(Stateful) Services can be an excellent way to run background jobs. They offer the RunAsync entry point, in which you can run your job, check (and store) progress. SF really shines when multiple services collaborate on tasks, offering SF Remoting as a communication channel, with built-in retry support.
You can choose to containerize your software, which would free you from platform lock-in, but prevent you from using some platform features.
By automating delivery of services (CI/CD), you can deploy to any platform you choose. This is not something that is specific to SF.
I want to deploy Kentico 9 site on Azure and want to use shared file system for my media content, can you please suggest which Azure configuration (Azure Cloud Services or Azure Web Apps) I should referred?
I'd highly recommend going with Web App over Cloud Services. Mainly because Web App is almost like running on a regular server where Cloud Services is quite a bit different and harder to work with in my opinion.
Check this article out regarding some issues with Kentico and Azure Blog storage as well as how to setup your storage provider to only store media files.
http://www.kehrendev.com/blog/brenden-kehren/may-2016/problems-with-azure-and-kentico
Could you describe what do you mean by shared file system for my media content?
From my experience - it`s (a little bit) easier to deploy (and maintain) Kentico to Azure Web Apps but they do not provide so many customizations - in my humble opinion - the biggest one is you are not able to connect via remote desktop (but this is supported by Azure Cloud Services).
Please note - if you are using Cloud Services you must use Azure Blob Storage - source - which could be in conflict with your requirements.
You can find more information about Web Apps vs Cloud Services vs Virtual Machines on the mentioned page.
TL;DR; - if you do not need customizations, remote desktop and startup tasks - go for WebApps. If not, try to specify more requirements.
You can also check comparinson of the technologies from the Microsoft`s point of view here.
It's not clear who you want to share the media with...
If you want to share the assets amongst more Kentico instances or with a 3rd party system, I'd probably use the Azure Blob Storage. Kentico comes with a dedicated file provider for this exact use out of the box. It's called CMS.AzureStorage.
Using the blob storage is not a limiting factor in terms of hosting your app. You can still use all available options: Web Apps, VM or Cloud Service. There are some technical implications, of course. But they're all described in the documentation.
I recommend checking the comparison matrix to find a hosting option that suits your need best. Kentico recommends using App Service (Web Apps) for most projects as it's easiest to maintain. However, you can't use certain features like Kentico Windows services, for instance. Question is, do you really need them?
Current my company delivers our software to our customers through a Citrix Xenapp Server. As administrators we are able to launch instances of the servers and our customers are only able to launch their specific application
My Question is does Windows Azure also offer this type of environment. I am looking to deploy a new version of our application and I am leaning towards Azure, but if that is the direction we go in I would like to migrate all of our existing system to Azure and not maintain both Azure and Citrix.
Greg,
In principle yes you can do this, but you can't just plug in Azure as a direct replacement for XenApp (with zero/minimal effort). Azure effectively has it's own runtime. While it is Windows based and there is certainly potential to reuse code in an existing app in an Azure equivalent, you would need to re-write your app to make it run in Azure.
Given your app is running on XenApp it is likely it is a fat client app, i.e. most of its logic lives in the main executable that you run on XenApp, with potentially some other back end services being utilised. In comparison you should think of Azure as a platform for providing web apps. So you would re-architect the app as an Azure hosted web app, then you could deploy it via Azure in a multi-tenanted manner to your customers who would then access it through a browser rather than a Citrix Receiver.
Regards,
Donovan
I've recently been asked to redevelop an .Net 2.0 WinForms application with a back end SQL Server Express DB.
One of the requirements is to allow remote users access to the application, so I've been considering hosted options to avoid VPN setup. The data is not sensitive and does not fall under data protection act, so a basic security approach for the web will cover me.
I like the idea of using Azure for a few reasons, but I'm not sure if a good fit for a users base of 5 or 6 with no real scope to grow. I've never used Azure and I plan to develop using MVC and a SQL backend as this is my main skillset.
A few points in favour of Azure in my mind are:
Tight integration with the TFS preview that I'm using for this project
Easy to setup a sandpit and a live version
Easy maintenance as I expect other hosted options will require more knowledge of underlying OS
Sticking to a full Microsoft stack should hopefully make things simpler
From what I find on the Azure site the message is all about scalability, which is great if you need it.
My question is simply, do you need a large user base, or plans to grow quickly, to use azure or is it how we should be hosting apps now?
What you're asking here is the perfect case for Windows Azure Web Sites:
You get 10 web sites for free (no custom DNS, but this is perfect for your 'sandpit'/test version). The shared mode supports custom DNS and is very cheap.
Tight integration with TFS preview and GitHub
You don't need to worry about the underlying OS, you simply publish from Visual Studio or with TFS Preview.
Sticking to the Microsoft stack is the easiest solution, but other technologies work great aswell. Since you're talking about MVC I'm assuming you are considering ASP.NET MVC, which is a perfect match with Windows Azure. Take a look at the training kit for some good examples.
The day you'll need a solution which more scalable (meaning you'll have more users and more income) you can easily upgrade to a reserved instance or to a Cloud Service (Web/Worker Role).
About your question: "My question is simply, do you need a large user base, or plans to grow quickly, to use azure or is it how we should be hosting apps now?"
Windows Azure is a cloud service platform (includes PaaS as Cloud Services, IaaS as Windows Azure Virtual Machines and also Websites suggest by Sandrino above), and with cloud services you have ability to start very small and grow as much and as quickly as your user requirement is, so you can use Azure with both cases. On the other hand there are some advantages using certain offering depend on your which service you are going to use to run your application.
I think article (Section: "What Should I Use? Making a Choice") will explain the strategy about how you make a selection among various services.
This SO discussion does talks about the difference between cloud Services and Azure WebSites as well.