Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
I am trying to understand how to do a backup all of my stuff on Azure VM/Role
For example I have a VM and I have installed and configured various stuff like a streaming server via remote desktop.
Now what happens if for some reason the VM needs to restart, hardware failure is one example for a need to reboot. What happens, do I need to re-install all my stuff?
So I don't get it, MS SLA guarantee 99.9% up-time for the VM, does this resolve to 0.01% chance of me doing the re-install? I think that the real chance me do the re-install is 100% sooner or later.
On AWS you can backup the EC2 to ESB or S3, you install all the stuff, take a snapshot and if the EC2 goes down, the snapshot is restored.
Here I found a post about how Azure doesn't support this, but it is from 1 year ago and I wonder if this has changed, but can't find any info.
backup/snapshot a vm image (vhd) in windows azure
In the management portal I see a lame button called [reimage], but what it does is quite different from what the name implies.
If this is still not possible, I fell that this will be a deal breaker and I will have to ditch Azure in favor of a mature solution from AWS
It sounds like you're looking for the recently announced Windows Azure Virtual Machine (IaaS) functionality. This new feature allows Azure to compete directly with Amazon's EC2 offering. With a Windows Azure Virtual Machine, the disk is a writable .vhd file stored in blob storage. If the machine stops for any reason (hardware failure or manual stoppage), the .vhd just sits in blob storage waiting for the machine to start up again. This article from the Windows Azure blog describes the new persistence options provided with the advent of Windows Azure VMs.
Related
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 3 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm trying to compare AWS and Azure for a custom web app that's essentially like any canned content management system. It requires web hosting, database, email, storage, security, some way to process ASP.NET but with high availability and load balanced.
The PaaS/IaaS distinction can sometimes be grey (in part because companies tend to use marketing jargon that portrays IaaS type services as maintenance free). From a small business perspective its quite clear though. If a service involves the SMB spend time maintaining rather than developing, its in the IaaS camp. Since I'm a single developer with limited time, a PaaS model for all services would be preferable. The ideal would be all services (web hosting, database, email, etc are offered as a zero maintenance scalable service rather than have to spin up and manage individual instances.
I find AWS can do everything but a drawback is that one still needs to manage instances (i.e. I would need to keep the software on instances updated, track instances, manage network, security, etc.) S3 doesn't process scripts. AWS Beanstalk and Optworks are still essentially mostly helper apps for starting up an IaaS type environment. (whereas say DynamoDB would count as a PaaS type service). Recently Microsoft has dropped prices on Azure which makes it an attractive alternative
In short, I am looking for a list of services offered by Azure which are actually no maintenance services that don't require I patch software or need to spin up instances to handle traffic spikes (e.g. web hosting, script processing, database, email, etc..)
web hosting, database, email, storage, security, some way to process ASP.NET but with high availability and load-balanced
All of the above are standard features which any matured cloud provider will have in the toolkit. In regards to MSFT Azure:
For web hosting - you have PaaS solutions such as App service plan
and App service environment. The upkeep of the platform (as the name suggests) is with Azure but note that any components that you deploy as part of the package belong to dev and test teams respectively
For database and storage - for a complete PaaS solution you have Azure SQL Server Database and Azure SQL Server Managed Instances, but as I said earlier you will anyways have to own any custom deployment (security policies, VNET injection and IAM's yourself)
Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 4 years ago.
Improve this question
We have below technical stack in our application
Angular 7
Asp.net core 2.2
Sql server
Images
To go for serverless architecture on Azure, we have map as follows
Angular 7 - Blob (as it is static)
Asp.net core 2.2 - Azure functions
SQL server - SQL as a service
Images - Blob
Now how to handle Azure functions#Edge ?
Do we have alike Lambda#Edge in AWS?
As far as I know there's no equivalent Azure service right now. In fact, back in October 2018, the comparison between Lambda#Edge and Azure IoT Edge was removed from the Services Comparison page.
The equivalent right now would be to use CloudFlare Workers combined with Azure Functions. Troy Hunt explains how he did just that to scale Have I Been Pwned in Serverless to the Max: Doing Big Things for Small Dollars with Cloudflare Workers and Azure Functions. The site has a lot of traffic and Troy Hunt pays for it out of his own pocket. Workers on the edge means that Have I Been Pwned doesn't have to hit Blob storage in most cases.
Right now this may be a very good choice. Cloudflare Workers are faster than Lambda#Edge at this point and CloudFlare offers very good caching, proxying and DDOS protection services. You'll have to consider startup time too. Javascript functions can start faster than Java or .NET Core functions, which means they can handle cold starts and request bursts better.
All of this will certainly change in the future. Functions on the edge is a lucrative market. Lambda#Edge will definitely get faster. Azure may add its own service or cooperate with CloudFlare.
Two questions:
1. Why not use any CDN on azure in order to server your static files? Blob storage is not for static content but usually for user related binaries.
2. Why not use the [Azure app service]1 to host your .net core api (if it is an api)?
You can find documentation on how to use the functions with .net core here
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 1 year ago.
Improve this question
I am considering three ways to to build a service bus topic listener:
Azure functions: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-bindings-service-bus
Service fabric: https://iamrufio.com/2017/04/21/azure-service-bus-listener-with-azure-service-fabric/
Web job: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Processing-Service-Bus-84db27b4
I'm not sure which way to go. I'm leaning towards Azure functions since it has a direct out-of-the-box service bus integration. However since it's fairly new I'm not sure if it's a safe option.
Service fabric, from what I've read, offers most resiliency and support.
And a web job would be safest to pick since everything is easily configurable but I'm afraid I'll be reinventing the wheel as no out-of-the-box support is provided.
What direction would be best?
It's a very open ended question. You should look at the requirements that you have and other constraints such as budget. For example, running a production grade Service Fabric cluster would require at least 5 nodes. Versus running webjob that would require a hosting plan with some scale out (for HA). Versus running with Azure Functions using consumption plan, where you'd pay per execution only after free grant 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-s of resource consumption per month is used up.
I would suggest to start simple, with Azure Functions. Create your prototype and see if that's what you need. Are you running into issue or not. With Functions utilization of Azure Service Bus could be somewhat limited. For example, you can't dead-letter a message as you either have to return successfully to complete it or throw an exception to retry. You can't defer a message, rather instead would need to send another message. Nor can you use transactional option by using send-via feature of Azure Service Bus.
If you find yourself requiring those features, WebJob would be my next candidate. You will have to look how you'd utilize it. Most likely you'll need to create your own receiving pump and handle things Functions offered for free, but you'll have the flexibility required to create multiple connections, configure clients the way you need, etc.
And only after that, if you see that aside from Service Bus you have requirements like data partitioning, or HA, or DR, or deploying and scaling out multiple services, I'd be more serious about Service Fabric.
Each of these 3 technologies has its place and use cases.
I am trying to deploy a nodejs app on azure vm but I keep reading that the vm machine can crash or restart.
So lets say I opened the vm and installed nodejs and all the required tools I need then I get my code from github and started it, now every thing is running okay.
I am wondering what would happen if the vm restarted/crashed? Will the tools I downloaded and my code be lost? how can I make the vm when it start to redownload the tools, setup the environment, download my code then run it?
Azure Virtual Machines use Azure Blobs to back the OS disk VHD, as well as any attached data disk VHD. So, for those disks, everything is durable, regardless whether the VM is running or not (or crashes).
VMs also provide temporary storage on ephemeral disks. Assume anything placed on these temporary disks can, and will, disappear upon crash/restart.
So if you install any type of code libraries, apps, etc. on OS or attached disks, things remain in place unless you decommission the VM (and related storage), or delete it yourself.
Lots of documentation around Azure Virtual Machines and Storage, which can provide additional details.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about a specific programming problem, a software algorithm, or software tools primarily used by programmers. If you believe the question would be on-topic on another Stack Exchange site, you can leave a comment to explain where the question may be able to be answered.
Closed 1 year ago.
Improve this question
I had created a web role in cloud service and it has feature to remote desktop by using this feature is it possible to Install sql server or any other softwares. if not possible why?
Basically the cloud service is assigned any random box as per availability so any physical storage might be lost in case you stop and restart the service or many times those are restarted if any patch is installed. So always have separate SQL server (you can choose from cloud SQL server also) instance.
SQL database (formerly SQL Azure) is a SQL Server as a service offering on azure. It has almost all the same features as sql server and is fully managed with zero downtime. It supports almost all of the same TSQL operations as the full blown sql server and you can easily migrate data, tables and stored procedures from an existing sql server to SQL Azure.
I'd use this instead of standing up your own sql server instance.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/sql-database/
If you want to stand up your own sql server instance in azure then definately check out the resource manager templates, heres one for SQL Server 2014 always on !
https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/tree/master/sql-server-2014-alwayson-dsc
Cloud service role instances are not suitable for durable storage of data. Expect any of the instances to disappear at any moment of time and then possibly be restarted on a totally clear VM. You should use something durable for persistent storage - that may be SQL Azure, Azure Storage or perhaps something else.
You might want to install SQL Server locally if for some reason your instance needs a local copy which can be accesses without network delays. You still should expect that your instance disappears at any moment. So installation should be automatic - such that when an instance is restarted on a new VM late on 1:00 AM on Sunday it works on its own. All valuable data must be periodically exported from that SQL Server instance to some durable storage, perhaps another SQL server. You could do that in code or setup some ready solution to do that.
Same applies to any other third-party software - its installation should work without human presence and useful data must be periodically exported to durable external storage. Expect to lose any data that is stored on the instance.