Despite playing catch-up to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure has quickly become a contender with its powerful Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings. With constant innovations around usability, open source and cross-platform compatibility, infrastructure management and evolving software development paradigms for new devices and applications, it can be hard to get your bearings within the vast platform.<\/p>\n
First things first: What comprises the Azure platform? It\u2019s not turtles all the way down; in Azure principal program manager Scott Hanselman\u2019s words, the underlying layer, the \u201cinfinite hard disk in the sky,\u201d is Azure storage, where you can drill down to every virtual hard disk (VHD) image in your deployment. The next level up comprises virtual machines, which you choose, configure and manage.<\/p>\n
On top of those VMs is a middle ground between IaaS and PaaS: Worker Roles, which are stateless cloud apps that can scale their VMs up or down. Above Worker Roles we are clearly in PaaS territory, with Web Apps, Azure Batch and HDInsight (Hadoop) for Big Data analysis. And at the top there are Web Jobs, Mobile Apps, and Media Services. These pieces are among those also available as the Azure Stack for on-premise datacenters or hybrid cloud applications.<\/p>\n
(Related: PaaS gets a new lease on life<\/a>)<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThe first distinction to make as an Azure customer is, do I want to consume VMs, or do I want to consume the platform that Azure provides me?\u201d said Esteban Garcia, Visual Studio ALM MVP and chief technologist for Nebbia Technology, and Azure company in Orlando. \u201cWithin PaaS, we typically do a Web app and SQL services. Those are pretty straightforward and easy to discover.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s likely that most cloud problems you\u2019re facing have already been solved somewhere in the Azure community, advises Corey Sanders, director of program management for Azure. \u201cMake sure you look at the full breadth of services we offer, because they solve a lot of different problems. That\u2019s the value of having a broad platform such as Azure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Read on for tips from these Azure experts.<\/p>\n 1<\/strong>. Saving pennies, saving dollars \u201cOne aspect of VMs that is not well known but that I think is super cool is the wide variety of VM sizes that we now offer,\u201d said Sanders. \u201cAnd the fact that when we stop a VM through the portal, we actually stop billing for it. The combo of those two has resulted in very few points of contention around billing.\u201d<\/p>\n The Azure Billing Alert Service can create customized billing alerts for your Azure accounts, and the pricing calculator<\/a> is your friend.<\/p>\n 2<\/strong>. Elastic Scale for Azure SQL Database \u201cPeople use SQL Service instead of the full server,\u201d said Garcia. \u201cWhenever you do that, you pay for Database Throughput Units. You could be paying for 10 databases with five DTUs [database throughput units], which is a small number of DTUs to use. What you can do is start using this elastic scale, say \u2018I\u2019m going to assign 100 DTUs to 10 databases,\u2019 and they are going to share that processing power among all the databases.\u201d In other words, a P3 tier database costs US$4.65 per DTU per month, while the same number of DTUs scaled out rather than up on an S2 instance cost $1.50 a month.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are all able to use that shared pool of resources rather than being constrained,\u201d said Garcia. \u201cIt gets along with the idea that cloud allows you to draw resources from anywhere as needed.\u201d<\/p>\n Currently in preview, Elastic Scale simplifies the scaling of data tiers from just a few to thousands of database shards via .NET client libraries and Azure service templates. High-volume OLTP, multi-tenant SaaS, and continuous data collection from telemetry and Internet of Things applications are likely use cases.<\/p>\n 3<\/strong>. Preview pricing 4<\/strong>. The Azure Portal \u201cI was not happy with the portal at first, but now it\u2019s growing on me,\u201d said Hanselman in his June 2015 TechDays UK keynote. \u201cIf you double-click on the background, you can change the theme to dark. This made me so happy.\u201d<\/p>\n Right-clicking on a given window pins it to the start board. Charts can be edited to show, say, CPU percentage, pricing, disk usage and more. \u201cDon\u2019t discount the portal quite yet; it\u2019s fantastic,\u201d said Hanselman.<\/p>\n 5<\/strong>. Keyboard shortcuts Hubs (left menu) shortcuts:<\/strong> Changing focus between blades shortcuts<\/strong>: 6<\/strong>. Azure resource manager \u201cAzure resource manager has an exciting, growing community,\u201d said Sanders. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing in templates for the resource manager\u2014starting about six months ago\u2014a pretty exciting pickup in the community. We seeded GitHub with a set of these templates and put them all out fully open source. Now we have over 140 contributors and more than 200 templates available. It\u2019s a delightful outcome to see this service that we didn\u2019t do a huge amount of coverage on get this kind of response. \u201cA customer can come in and say, \u2018I want VM Scale Sets in groups of 10, and I want to configure them all with a tool like Chef or Puppet,\u2019 \u201d said Sanders. \u201cThe other aspect with Scale Sets that\u2019s exciting is the deep integration with Azure Insights autoscale, which restricts cost and spending by only using the compute resources you need, responding to traffic changes.\u201d<\/p>\n 8<\/strong>. Security 9<\/strong>. Site extensions 10<\/strong>. PowerShell cmdlets 11<\/strong>. Service fabric 12<\/strong>. Docker \u201cSimply stated, if I\u2019ve got a tiny little 10MB PHP app sitting inside of a 5GB VHD, that\u2019s a lot of VHD, a lot of virtual machine for a small Web application,\u201d he said. \u201cDoes it really need that weight? That much security and isolation? It just needs to be in a container, and it needs to be deployable in a reliable way. Docker will provide that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe excitement around Docker is very real. It makes it incredibly easy to deploy in ways that have never been possible,\u201d said Sanders, who notes new integration of Docker support into Visual Studio and the Azure marketplace.<\/p>\n \u201cMy biggest tip and trick with Docker containers is just to deploy one. If you\u2019ve never done anything with Docker, there\u2019s a way to quickly deploy with a fully packaged VM and Docker in the Azure marketplace. No bringing down of the Docker engine, no pulling down the hub.\u201d<\/p>\n 13<\/strong>. Azure DevTest Labs \u201cWith Azure Dev\/Test labs, the idea is that a lot of times developers have to wait for someone to spin up labs for them,\u201d said Nebbia\u2019s Garcia. \u201cThis allows you to spin up environments much quicker. You can choose for it to run a maximum eight hours, and after that it gets shut down. It\u2019s a quick way to provision environments but avoid the problem of leaving it up and running. You can push a button and have whole sandbox.\u201d<\/p>\n 14<\/strong>. Application Insights 15<\/strong>. Kudu, CloudBerry and Sendy Another useful freeware tool is CloudBerry Explorer for Azure Blob Storage, which offers a file manager-style user interface to Azure Blob Storage.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re already mucking around in the cloud, you may have e-mail update needs that can be met by Sendy or similar tools. Sendy was designed to work with Amazon Simple Email Service, but can be adapted for Azure as well. The cost savings versus a hosted e-mail solution such as MailChimp can be enormous.<\/p>\n 16<\/strong>. Remote debugging \u201cSuch capabilities should be provided in a way that fits well with the other tools used by the developer\u2014command-line tools, graphical tools, embedded components for development environments. Ideally these tools should work via an API that is exposed by the PaaS system\u2014cloud service customers should look for these APIs and assure themselves that the API can be used by a variety of custom tooling code.\u201d<\/p>\n Remote debugging with Visual Studio fits the bill: Developers interact with cloud applications as if they were on-premise. Best used with Visual Studio 2013, remote debugging lets you manipulate memory, set breakpoints, and step through code\u2014with the caveat that breaking a running process could break your live website. Save this one for pre-production sites.<\/p>\n 17<\/strong>. Performance testing \u201cWe started using performance testing in the past six months,\u201d said Garcia. \u201cIf you spin up a Web application, you\u2019re able to do a performance test right from Azure, right in the cloud. Before, it was more on the Visual Studio side. So I can see what it looks like if 1,000 people hit my app at once. It\u2019s very useful in knowing how to scale the application: We can have fewer servers, but make them stronger by adding this performance testing feature right within the Azure portal when you first launch an application.\u201d<\/p>\n 18<\/strong>. Easy ROI: Lift and shift 19<\/strong>. Developer services marketplace 20<\/strong>. Ride the IoT wave Microsoft Azure IoT Hub offers SDKs, management and security solutions to harness a plethora of IoT devices, and once the data is collected, there are new machine-learning tools available to process data stored in HD Insight, Microsoft\u2019s version of the Hadoop Big Data store. Have fun!<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>The promise of the cloud is elasticity: sizing your deployment according to demand. Too often, Azure users are surprised by the multiple dimensions of pricing, from storage to transactions, support, bandwidth and more. The first step toward transparency in billing is not to \u201cset it and forget it\u201d but to monitor, measure and adjust frequently.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Performance and price limits on Azure SQL Database, which offer a subset of SQL Server features, can slow you down while also burning cash.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>The aforementioned Elastic Scale is just one example of many new features available at preview pricing, which may be free or 50% less than the general availability pricing. Taking advantage of preview pricing lets you play with new features, stay ahead of the technical curve, save money, and possibly beat the competition by having production-ready deployments when the features go live for all customers. A list of preview services for Azure is available here<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Also in preview is the Azure Portal, a new dashboard for accessing IaaS and PaaS deployments.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Every computer user knows the mouse can be deadly, in terms of ergonomics and efficiency. The best economy of movement is achieved with keyboard shortcuts. Launched with version 5.0 of the Azure Portal, the shortcut menu can be accessed by hitting shift + ?. Luckily, there aren\u2019t too many to memorize. You\u2019ll want to use these and more:<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>H<\/strong> \u2013 show startboard
\nN<\/strong> \u2013 open Notifications hub
\nA<\/strong> \u2013 open Active Journeys hub (a Journey is the current opened group of blades; a blade is card\/tab\/subpage that contains some group of tiles, e.g. website properties or analytics)
\n\/<\/strong> \u2013 open Browse\/Search hub
\nB<\/strong> \u2013 open Billing hub
\nC<\/strong> \u2013 open Create\/New hub<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>J<\/strong> \u2013 move focus to the previous blade
\nK<\/strong> \u2013 move focus to the next blade
\nF<\/strong> \u2013 move focus to the first blade
\nL<\/strong> \u2013 move focus to the last blade<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>The complexity of managing websites, virtual machines and databases just got a little simpler with the addition of the resource manager in the new Azure Portal. Group and view resources (such as an instance of Application Insights along with a Web application and SQL database) as a single resource group. Deployment templates in Visual Studio are also aided by IntelliSense that surfaces new resource providers and template language functions to you as you write deployment templates, avoiding pesky naming errors.<\/p>\n
\n7<\/strong>. Scale Sets
\n<\/strong>Do you have Big Data or container-based workloads? You may want to orchestrate these complex, large-scale deployments with Scale Sets. Also in public preview, Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets let you manage and configure virtual machines as a set of identical Windows or Linux images.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>A Denial of Service attack can hurt your wallet, hamstring your business and harm your customers. Like other cloud providers, Microsoft aims to share its security knowledge as well as build in basic protections. Azure Security Center\u2019s view lets you set policies across all your subscriptions and monitor security configurations. The good news is, the days of accidentally raising DDOS flags by testing or polling your own app are over, thanks to cutting-edge threat intelligence around malformed requests and traffic sources.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Another powerful way to add custom administration features to your Web apps is with site extensions. Write them yourself or choose from the new Site Extensions Galler<\/a> These live on the SCM (site control manager) site for administration and debugging that runs over SSL and is created with every Azure website. The URL for your SCM site is the hostname plus \u201cscm\u201d. Thus, \u201csdtimes.azurewebsites.net\u201d would have a corresponding SCM site at \u201csdtimes.scm.azurewebsites.net\u201d.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Whether you want to clean up a deployment where you have some extra VHDs and VMs lying around, provision VMs, set up cross-premises networks, or other production tasks, you\u2019ll enjoy the Unix-like scripting power of PowerShell and the new PowerShell cmdlets. As of the November 2015 update of the Azure SDK 2.8 for Visual Studio 2013 and Visual Studio 2015, the PowerShell script for deploying Azure Resource Manager templates now works with PowerShell cmdlets. Find scripting solutions already crafted for you in the PowerShell Gallery.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Riding the microservices revolution, Service Fabric is Azure\u2019s platform for assembling cloud applications from a large collection of services. \u201cService fabric offers a platform that runs on Azure but also on-premises,\u201d said Sanders. \u201cThis is a platform for deploying, managing and maintaining microservices. Discovery is handled for you, and it supports stateful and stateless microservices.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>The explosion of ways you can tinker with cloud resources, from remote desktops and SSH to portal shortcuts, has only just begun. According to Hanselman, the microservices revolution means there will soon be even more options to choose from.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>How do you avoid using up all your MSDN credit while testing on Azure? The preview of Azure DevTest Labs<\/a> lets you spin up Windows and Linux environments to deploy and test applications while avoiding cost overruns.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>\u201cApplication Insights allows you to dig down and find the root cause of any application issues and understand how people are using the application,\u201d said Garcia. \u201cI\u2019ve been using it for a year and half…as a Microsoft MVP.\u201d For example, he uses it for availability testing from different geographic locations, either as a static test that checks a single page, or as a test of dynamic application flow.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>The Kudu open-source project is a useful troubleshooting tool and client-side process explorer for capturing memory dumps or looking at deployment. It\u2019s also a site extension and welcomes community participation.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>In its September 2015 white paper, \u201cPractical Guide to Platform-as-a-Service Version 1.0,\u201d the Cloud Standards Customer Council notes that no PaaS worth its salt should be without remote debug capabilities. \u201cApplication developers should have access to tools that enable them to control activities in the PaaS\u2014for example, uploading (\u2018pushing\u2019) application code, binding services to applications, controlling application configuration, starting and stopping application instances,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Another public preview that is currently free to use, performance testing, allows you to generate thousands of virtual users from around the world and test your application against the load.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Want an instant return on your cloud investment? Eliminate idle servers that only handle periodic loads. \u201cThis is something people forget about when they\u2019re thinking about the cloud,\u201d said Hanselman. \u201cAzure storage, that\u2019s an infinite disk that\u2019s out there. You probably have a machine sitting under your desk and it\u2019s got a VM, running maybe an expense reporting system. It\u2019s something that you need to lift and shift into the cloud. There are migration tools that can help you. Literally, it\u2019s Hyper-V in the cloud, but that\u2019s only the most basic way of using Azure. So, Step 0: Lift and shift. Then start thinking about other ways to exploit stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Before you reinvent speech recognition, check the Developer Services Marketplace for free and paid ways to extend functionality, turbo-charge development, and manage cloud deployments with certified Azure tools such as io for event-driven computing, or face APIs from Project Oxford<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>No set of tips would be complete without instructions on how to program the proverbial light bulb. These days, Internet of Things projects are everywhere. Hanselman, a type 1 diabetic, movingly demonstrated in a November 2015 keynote video how he tracks his blood sugar and insulin pump in the cloud with Azure technologies.<\/p>\n