Implementing Azure Cloud Design Patterns: Implement efficient design patterns for data management, high availability, monitoring and other popular patterns on your Azure Cloud

Implementing Azure Cloud Design Patterns

Implement efficient design patterns for data management, high availability, monitoring, and other popular patterns on your Azure Cloud

Oliver Michalski

Stefano Demiliani

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Implementing Azure Cloud Design Patterns

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I would like to dedicate this book to my little daughter, Sara: I love you! maybe one day you will be proud of me for this!

– Stefano Demiliani

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Contributors

About the authors

Oliver Michalski started his IT career in 1999 as a web developer. Now, he is a senior software engineer for Microsoft .NET and an SOA architect. He also works as an independent enterprise consultant in the field of Microsoft Azure. When he started with Microsoft Azure in 2011, there was no Azure community in Germany. Therefore, Oliver founded Azure Community Germany (ACD).

Oliver has been the chairman of the ACD, since April 2016, and since July 2017 he has been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Microsoft Azure.

Stefano Demiliani is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) and a long-time expert on different Microsoft technologies. He has a master's degree in computer engineering from Politecnico of Turin. He works as a CTO for EID/Navlab (Microsoft partner in Italy) and he's frequently involved on helping customers on moving their business to the Azure cloud.

He has worked with Packt for many IT books and he's the author of Building ERP solutions with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, a hands-on guide to building enterprise architectures based on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP and the Azure platform.

This book is a dream that has come true (the cloud is my passion and writing a book about Azure is for me a reached target). Thanks to all the wonderful staff that has worked with me over these months, and thanks also to my family (I'll return to you all the hours spent working on this book).

About the reviewer

Florian Klaffenbach started his IT career in 2004 as first- and second-level IT support technician and IT salesman trainee for a B2B online shop. Since then, he has taken several steps from IT admin, to support agent, to community manager, and cloud architect at Dell and CGI, and then ended up as a technology solutions professional for Microsoft in 2017. In April 2016, he was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, honoring his work for the IT community.

I want to thank the team at Packt for giving me the chance to review the book, as well as my little family for letting me invest the time I had into these projects.

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Table of Contents

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Download the example code files

Download the color images

Conventions used

Get in touch

Reviews

An Introduction to the Microsoft Azure Platform

Cloud service models and cloud deployment models

Cloud service models

Cloud deployment models

Azure execution models

Azure application building blocks

Azure data services

Azure platform services

How is access to Azure organized?

How is work with Azure organized?

Summary

Compute Design and Management

IaaS I (Azure VMs)

What is an Azure series?

Single VMs

Multiple VMs

Azure availability sets

N-tier deployment

N-tier (multi-regions) deployment

IaaS II (Azure Container Services)

What is an Azure Container Service?

Understanding containers

Cluster

Orchestrator

Which Orchestrator should I choose?

Mesosphere DC/OS

Docker Swarm

Kubernetes

PaaS I (Azure App Services)

PaaS II (Azure Service Fabric, also known as Azure microservices)

Summary

Data Storing and Processing

Choosing the right data solution

What is variety?

What is volume?

Concurrency and consistency

Replication and redundancy

Other factors

Which Azure data services are available?

Management

Azure Data Catalog

Processing

Azure Data Factory

Azure Stream Analytics

Azure Time Series Insights

Storage

Azure Storage Blob service

Azure Storage Blob service premium

Azure Storage Queue service

Azure Storage Table service

Azure Files

SQL as a service

Azure SQL Database

SQL Server Stretch Database

Azure PostgreSQL

Azure MySQL

Other offers

NoSQL as a service

Azure CosmosDB

Big data

Azure HDInsight

Azure Data Lake Store

Azure Data Lake Analytics

Analytics

Cortana Intelligence Suite

AI

Azure Machine Learning

Cognitive Services

Bot Framework

Virtualization

PowerBI

PowerBI Embedded

Azure Time Series Insights

Summary

Networking Design and Management

Anatomy of a VNet infrastructure

Connectivity

Internet connectivity

Connectivity between Azure resources (internal connectivity)

Azure VNet peering

Azure global VNet peering

Azure VNet-to-VNet (VPN gateway)

On-premises connectivity

Azure Site-to-Site

Azure Point-to-Site

Azure ExpressRoute

Azure VNet service endpoints

Important note

Routing, load balancing, or more general traffic directions

Routing

User-defined routes

Routing using the BGP

Azure Load Balancer

Azure Traffic Manager

Azure Application Gateway

Security

NSG

Application security groups

Security infrastructure

NVA

Management and monitoring

Summary

Availability

What is availability?

First approach

Second approach

Uptime and downtime

SLA

Planned maintenance

What are the effects?

Azure autoscaling

Summary

Performance and Scalability

What is performance?

What is a DTU?

Service level objectives

Analyzing and interpreting performance data

What are our business workloads?

Why is knowledge about existing business workloads important to us?

What are we still missing?

Scaling

What can you see?

What is different here?

Where can I use autoscaling?

Summary

Monitoring and Telemetry

About telemetry data

What is a metric?

Client metrics

How do I collect the data from client metrics?

What data is collected?

Business metrics

How do I collect the data from business metrics?

What is a profiler?

What data is collected?

Application metrics

How do I collect the data from application metrics?

What data is collected?

System metrics

How do I collect the data from system metrics?

What data is collected?

Service metrics

How do I collect the data from service metrics?

What data is collected?

An overview of monitoring

Azure management portal

System specific tools

Microsoft SC

Microsoft OMS

How do I start my work with the OMS?

Azure Monitor

Which capabilities can be seen here?

Which data (metric) is available?

Azure Application Insights

What data is captured by Azure Application Insights?

Grafana

How do I start my work with Grafana?

Azure Log Analytics

If Azure Log Analytics is part of OMS, why do I need to talk about it again?

Azure Network Watcher

Summary

Resiliency

What is Resiliency?

Architecture design patterns for Resiliency

Retry pattern with transient failures

Load balancing

Data replication

Circuit Breaker pattern

Throttling pattern

Queue-Based Load Leveling pattern

Compensating Transaction pattern

Summary

Identity and Security

Security in the cloud

Azure network security

SSO and MFA

Azure MFA setup

Federation and the Federated Identity Pattern

Gatekeeper pattern

Valet Key pattern

Summary

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Preface

A well-designed cloud infrastructure covers factors such as consistency, maintenance, simplified administration and development, security, scalability, and reusability. Hence, it is important to choose the right architectural pattern as it has a huge impact on the quality of cloud-hosted services.

This book covers all Azure design patterns and functionalities needed to help you build your cloud infrastructure to fit your system requirements. Each of these patterns describes a problem that you normally could have when implementing a cloud infrastructure—a recommended solution for your problem (pattern appliance) and pros and cons of applying this pattern.

Using a pattern (or at least thinking about it) is a recommended way of working when designing an enterprise cloud-based infrastructure.

Who this book is for

This book is targeted at cloud architects and cloud solution providers who are looking for an extensive guide to implementing different patterns for the deployment and maintenance of services in Microsoft Azure. Prior experience with Azure is required as the book is completely focused on design patterns.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, An Introduction to the Microsoft Azure Platform, gives an overview of the Azure platform. Also, we will learn the basics of cloud services and cloud deployment models,  the Azure execution model, the Azure application building blocks, the Azure data services, and how to access and work with Azure.

Chapter 2, Compute Design and Management, discusses the basic architectures behind the compute services from the Azure platform, such as Azure VMs, Azure Container Services, Azure App Services, and Azure Service Fabric. We will also learn that services never act alone, but rather interact with various Azure resources.

Chapter 3, Data Storing and Processing, gives basic information on data storage and processing. Here we will get an answer to the question: How do you choose the right data solution? We will also see an overview of the Azure data services that are available.

Chapter 4, Networking Design and Management, takes you through the anatomy of a VNet, and the network elements also deep dives into connectivity, routing, and more.

Chapter 5, Availability, starts with an insight into specific aspects of architecture that are important for the daily use of the Azure platform and are part of the design process for your own Azure solutions.

Chapter 6, Performance and Scalability, provides an answer to all your questions related to these topics and also part of the design process for your own Azure solutions.

Chapter 7, Monitoring and Telemetry, covers these topics in two parts. In part one, we discuss the question of what type of data we are actually talking about. In part two, we discuss the possible ways to capture this data.

Chapter 8, Resiliency, describes the recommended patterns to implement in order to create a cloud-based solution that can handle and recover from failures in a secure way without compromising data and transactions.

Chapter 9, Identity and Security, describes the recommended patterns for implementing identity and security features on Azure (for users and for applications and cloud services).

To get the most out of this book

Activate a free Azure subscription (30 days with all the Azure features available to test). Practice with the samples described in the book.

Download the example code files

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The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Implementing-Azure-Cloud-Design-Patterns. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/ImplementingAzureCloudDesignPatterns_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

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An Introduction to the Microsoft Azure Platform

Cloud computing was, and still is, one