Microsoft promises to discontinue the old (Silverlight) Management Portal "this summer" so we now have to use the new (HTML 5) portal.
I personally and several people I've talked to find the new portal awful because it doesn't provide as fine control as the old one did. We find it so bad that maybe even consider writing our own tools.
Yes, I'm well aware about cmdlets, Management API, but I'd prefer something with GUI more or less like the old portal.
What other ways are there to manage Azure cloud services that provide GUI and fine control?
Do take a look at Cerebrata tools especially Azure Management Studio: http://www.cerebrata.com.
If you aren't ready for all the features of Azure Management Studio then try the free Blob manipulation tool, Azure Explorer, which is robust and very easy to use:
http://www.cerebrata.com/labs/azure-explorer
(Short video review here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO7g7XCDEIg)
For what it's worth, I think the Azure team have done a really excellent job with the Portal, including just the right amount of functionality for the majority of users.
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I have an Azure application consisting of various resources like Logic Apps, Service Bus & Event Grid. As Azure monitor now supports monitoring only the resources involved, are there any solutions that provides application-level monitoring?
Monitoring serverless resources in Azure has now become way easy as there are several third-party tools to achieve what you're looking for. As this question is just about suggestion, I'll suggest a tool that best matches your context, as I am a part of the development team. You should explore Serverless360. It is widely used all over the globe to solve the main problem that most of the organisations face: Business-level application management and monitoring.
Serverless360 has a dedicated module for this where you can pile up all your Azure resources that constitute your LoB application. Not only monitoring, but also there are several other options that Azure portal doesn't provide, for which you will have to go for different tools like Service Bus Explorer, Storage account explorer, App insights, New Relic to achieve things. Serverless360 is an all-in-one solution where you no longer have to look for a second tool for your management of Azure resources.
Also, you can take a look at the top Azure monitoring tools that best suits your needs.
I know of ARM, the REST SDK and the CLI Powershell cmdlets.
What I want to know is; which of these has the most extensive support for scripting resources without having to touch the (indeed very slow) Azure Portal?
And I would also really like to know which one of these Microsoft usually ship first with regards to preview features?
Each service in Azure is exposed using a REST API. Most of those APIs are publically supported. Some aren't.
It depends on the team that builds the elements that make up Azure and often their primary customer base. The Windows IaaS and AAD teams have been mostly PowerShell first. Machine learning and AI seem to favor azure-cli, which is built in Python, a very commonly used language in big data scenarios. The Azure Devops team has recently moved from the Visual Studio to the Azure brand (formerly Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Online, Team Foundation Service preview). Their tools are mostly Node and Powershell based. Not everything in Azure is a "Resource", per se. So not all things are created or updated using Azure Resource Manager Templates (ARM).
So, unfortunately, there is no golden hammer when it comes to automating Azure.
Azure REST Api is, obviously, the best way to go, but its the least convenient (there probably is a better word for this). I really like arm templates, they (basically) allow you to define REST api calls you want to do and allow to do some looping\parametrizing\etc. As arm templates are just a proxy for the rest api, they usually work really well.
I'm doing some research to migrate virtual machines(vmware) to the new Azure Resource Manager portal.
I already succeeded doing this with powershell. But I was wondering if there where other methods to do this faster and more efficient with less downtime?
There is the Azure Site Recovery:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-site-recovery-ga-move-vmware-aws-hyper-v-and-physical-servers-to-azure/
"Customers can replicate on-premises workloads to Azure with Azure Site Recovery for 31 days at no charge, effectively making migration to Azure free."
I do enjoy the cunning of #alexandr's solution! However the official solution from Microsoft is that they are currently building the tools to automate this for you.
from the Transitioning to the Resource Manager model blog. There are a basic set of scripts and a timeline for the more complex migrations (no VNet etc)
To directly answer your question, it seems like Powershell is the tool of choice for managing the migration. (I imagine if you leave it for long enough there will be a 'migrate' button in the portal, as they seem very eager to move everyone away from ASM)
Is there any way to save the complete state of my azure configuration?
Basically, I just created a demo for a project I'm working on. This demo has a website/webjob, scheduler, storage queue, storage blob, redis cache and documentDB. I have configured these components in terms of size/scale/schedules but now the demo is done.
I don't want to pay for these services and I don't need them online for now. However, I don't want to have to recreate and reconfigure them if I need to relaunch the demo in a month.
Is there a way to save my current azure configurations to a file and then to be able to recreate all the services again automatically (with a script or a small program)?
Thanks!
This is a very good question, that sums up a historical problem we're in the process of making easier and more flexible. I'll answer this question with two parts.
First and foremost, you have tools like the PowerShell cmdlets now, that you can script out the creation of an entire "world" in Azure and then re-run whenever you want, against a subscription, to scaffold out a whole architecture. You can also use the management libraries for .NET to do this from a .NET application. When we embarked on the VS WebJobs tooling, for instance, I worked up a prototype for my developers on using MAML to create WebJobs and scheduler job collections. You can see the demo code for that here: https://github.com/bradygaster/maml-demo-scheduled-webjob-creator
We've also recently embarked on new mission of re-creating a lot of the management APIs so that they support the notion of templates and resource groups, to marry up with the new portal experience. Here's a great MSDN article that discusses how the PowerShell cmdlets for the Gallery could be used to pull down a list of the various templates that could then be pushed back up as fully-baked architectures running in Azure. You have the capability of building these templates yourself, then you could use these cmdlets to fan out and create things that you write up in your own custom templates. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn654596.aspx
Hope this helps!
For Azure websites you can use the Back and Restore option to store the site and restore it back when you want to demo again, But all you have to do is Stop the services and you should be able to keep the demo without incurring cost.
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.