What type of projects/software applications are suitable for Azure and why?
Thanks
Rather than thinking of what can be supported in Azure, it might be more helpful to think about its challenges as you decide to port your app over:
Web applications. Since a Web Role hosts IIS, you'll generally have little issue porting a general-purpose asp.net or asp.net mvc website to Azure. There are some glitches you'll run into - see my related answer for more details.
UI. If your app has specific output similar to a WinForms app, you won't be able to run it since you have no video output.
GPU dependencies. If you're doing some background processing dependenton a specific GPU, you won't be able to run in an Azure VM.
Registry and other system-level access. If your app needs to update the registry or run an MSI, you won't be able to install your app.
Instance affinity. If your app requires session stickiness (e.g. a logged-in user MUST visit the same server instance with each access), you won't be able to accomplish this.
COM interop. COM interop is very limited, since you can't install anything via the registry. If you rely on Excel Services, you won't have that capability.
SQL limitations. SQL Azure is limited to 50GB today, and offers no ability to custom-tune the server instance. Also, while it does support a big subset of SQL Server, it doesn't support 100% of SQL Server, so it's possible some of your sprocs may no longer work. There's no SQL Agent today, so you'd need to recreate that functionality in a worker process.
That's just a quick braindump of some challenges you might run into - I'm sure there are others.
Just keep in mind that Azure is providing Windows 2008 Server images for your app to run on, so if your app can run in that environment today, and doesn't require things I listed, you should be in pretty good shape.
You can make most of the .NET projects working in Azure. Azure has support of following project types: web site (both ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC), worker (background application) and wcf service.
Don't forget security too - there's various ways of authenticating onto Azure but none are as simple as just setting IIS/ASP to windows auth.
Related
i have a web application which is created using .net framework 2.0 which is running on windows server 2003.is it possible to migrate that to Microsoft azure.if so does it require an entire rebuild on azure?
A really useful utility for this case is Azure Migration Assistant.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/migration-assistant/
It will check all your IIS sites and show you if it can be moved up to an App Service, checking target framework, port bindings, etc.
If everything is ok, it can do the migration for you.
Worst case scenario, you can move your application to Azure inside a VM.
It depends on what you mean by "migrate".
If you think about moving as is, you have an option to choose IaaS, where you'll just get a VM and do what you want on it. That'll give you both full control as well as full responsibility over your app.
Otherwise, if you want to avail of the PaaS offering, you'll have to make minor tweaks to your application (assuming the framework version is supported).
Is there any article or resources that list the type of .NET features and SDKs that work in a standard .NET console application, it does not work in Azure WebJobs hosting environment?
My understanding is that Azure WebJobs hosting environment is a typical windows server VM that includes .NET framework. I expect most of SDK based on .NET such as the variety of Azure SDK or Entity framework should work flawlessly in a WebJobs hosted console application. I like to know things that do not work in a WebJobs hosting environment before I make application design decisions.
I am looking for issues that might arise due to local security policy restriction or low privileged AD identity.
WebJobs run in a secure environment called a sandbox. The execution environment of sandbox is different from a local execution environment mainly due to multi-tenancy — because a single physical machine in the data center can be concurrently executing apps and services belonging to a large number of differing customers.
I like to know things that do not work in a WebJobs hosting environment before I make application design decisions.
The sandbox generally aims to restrict access to shared components of Windows. Unfortunately, many core components of Windows have been designed as shared components: the registry, cryptography, and graphics subsystems, among others. This section outlines the limitations placed on usage of these often essential, yet shared components.
For more information, link below is for your reference.
Azure Web App sandbox
Exist three ways for deploy Node.js app on Windows Azure, web-role, web-site and git-azure (link). I don't know whitch is most efficient for my needs. My app is readability algorithm with RESTful API, whitch parse news sites, simple computing, but highload. Of course, I need transparent horizontal scaling. I hope for your help.
My $0.02.
If your product is only based on Node.js, without many layers and components such as background workers, business logic layer and API layer, Windows Azure Web Site should be the best choice. It's very simple to deploy Node.js application through Git, GitHub, TFS, FTP, etc. It also provides scaling-up (in reserve mode) and scaling-out options. But keep in mind that all applications under Windows Azure Web Site will be running in 32bit WOW mode.
Windows Azure Web Role is similar as Windows Azure Web Site, but you need configure the Node.js environment by yourself. (If you are using the azure powershell tool, it can help you establish the node stuff by using some startup commands.) If you need something working in worker roles, or the caching (not the shared caching), Web Role may be better.
I've never heard about the git-azure but it looks like a tooling that you can host more than one node application on worker role.
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.