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Microsoft Azure, most of the time, is a cloud computing service of Microsoft. Microsoft Azure solution allows enterprises to use the cloud for better development and management of simple and complex applications.
You can build, test, deploy, and manage applications and services. Microsoft stores everything in its data centers.
It provides Azure in the form of software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) models.
It supports both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems. Understanding the specific demands for enterprise applications, Microsoft offers numerous capabilities to build robust business solutions.
This includes many tools and development environments to deploy the cloud services smoothly. The benefits of using the Microsoft Azure platform are discussed next.
About Azure Platform
Before starting with the building part, you must understand the basics of Azure. With the Azure platform, developers can focus on designing and building highly scalable and resilient cloud-based enterprise applications.
It can be used for various purposes, from developing mobile and web apps to hosting apps. You can consult a Microsoft Technology Associate for better understanding too.
You can replace your traditional systems completely, add on to them, or even get started. This is especially useful if you want to venture into the Internet of Things (IoT) world.
The insights you gain can be used for making better decisions and improving the end-user experience. For example, you can learn which services your organization uses most and track spending and usage trends. This can ensure that you can meet your organization's basic requirements from time to time.
Working
Microsoft Azure cloud solutions, similar to any other existing cloud platforms, are based on a technology that is called "virtualization" in technical jargon.
Consider the collection of servers present in any data center in racks or clusters. The racks have multiple blades or servers with modular designs for better optimization. This is done to decrease the use of space as well as energy.
The switch provides network connectivity, while the power distribution unit (PDU) gives power.
The servers execute simple sets of instructions for their customers or end-users. This can be considered an "emulation of hardware by the software.
Some other servers run a distributed application for the management of clouds known as a "fabric controller." This software allocates tasks that need to be performed. It also keeps a check on the health of the server and its services or tasks. If there are any issues, it will ensure that the servers restore their original functionality.
The fabric controllers are connected to servers that run the software, which is responsible for hosting web-based services, representational state transfer APIs, and the databases in use.
When requests are made over the web via the front end, in the case of ASP.NET development services, first of all, validation and then verification of authorized access are done.
Once the confirmation process is complete, it is only checked how to allot resources based on the capacity.
Users are free from the burden of maintaining and upgrading hardware, as it is automatically done. The process is commonly termed orchestration in system administration.
This saves a lot of time and makes scalability a possibility.
Subscription and Deployment Models
The Azure Enterprise portal has two types of subscriptions for its customers who wish to get started with enterprise application development.
Suppose you have an all-product usage and want to stay moderate with infrastructure. In that case, Microsoft Azure Enterprise is for you.
Another option, enterprise dev/test, is much more suitable for all team dev/test workloads and medium-to-heavy individual dev/test workloads.
You can get access to special Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) images and better service rates that you would prefer to use.
Microsoft's Azure solution offers two deployment models for cloud resources: the classic deployment model and the Azure resource manager.
In the classic deployment model, all the resources are treated as separate entities and managed individually. These resources range from virtual machines (VMs) to SQL or no SQL databases.
Whereas in the case of Azure Resource Manager, the users can form different groups for utilities that are connected or related to each other.
This can be useful for deploying, managing, and monitoring all the closely coupled resources.
Azure Storage and Database
You can use relational and non-relational databases for your enterprise mobility solutions, depending on the available data's purpose.
Azure table storage is the go-to option if you aim to store loosely structured data. If you wish to use relational databases' features, the Azure SQL database is the way to go. You can use indexing and complex queries for data analysis and manipulation.
It is based on your application and whether you wish to use such a shared database.
Azure Backup enables the restoration of Virtual Machine (VM) Scale Sets without heavy expenses. The model enables a logical grouping of platform-managed virtual machines.
Scale sets are used for creating VMs using a VM configuration model given at the time of scale set creation. They can only manage VMs that are implicitly created based on the configuration model.
DevOps
Azure allows Dev-Ops connections to control the monitoring and management of the Azure cloud solutions. You do not have to worry about infrastructure management, as the vendor, Microsoft, takes care of it.
This spares time so that developers can focus on more important things. With the aid of sample projects and the developer community, apps can sometimes be built within a few hours.
Read More: An essential tool for integrating Microsoft Azure into your development environment
Benefits of using Microsoft Azure
Besides being cost-effective and easy to use, Microsoft Azure has numerous other benefits. Some of them are mentioned next.
- Use what you already know
Azure can use whatever languages, tools, platforms, and frameworks you like. You can improve your knowledge by using new technologies or adding new skills.
There is a global community of developers, and all resources are easily available in case you get stuck.
- Save time
The features and development tools integrated into Azure ensure that you spend less time doing repetitive tasks.
You can automate routine tasks in Azure environments. This helps in better productivity, and developers tend to be more relaxed when performing mundane tasks without actual value.
For this, you can create workflows, also known as "runbooks." This helps streamline everything in your cloud environment.
Also, the app is still secure and reliable. DevOps is also integrated with the platform.
- Cost-effective
Microsoft Azure works on a pay-as-you-go model.
So, it is great for small businesses wanting to avoid investing heavily starting. There are discounts available as per user needs too. This gives an edge to Azure over its competitors since it can offer vast capabilities at low rates comparatively.
Based on your subscription plan, you might save a lot compared to traditional options.
- Scale on demand
Most traditional hosting models break down when there is a sudden growth in your business or a high traffic load.
It is mainly because it is hard to predict the demand for increased resources during a period. But Azure enterprise application development provides auto-scaling options to organizations depending on load or schedule.
The applications are run from multiple servers (load balancing), and there is never a complete shutdown of all services.
The applications are loaded as a cluster, and the processes are run.
For mission-critical workloads where a failure or decrease in performance cannot be tolerated even for unexpected spikes, larger premium SSD disk sizes (above 512 GiB) have disk bursting support.
The on-demand bursting capability enables users to burst up to 6 times (up to 30,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 1,000 MBs of throughput) of the provisioned amount.
This improves flexibility and scalability further. This is different for credit-based systems, where bursting is only supported if you have accumulated credits and cannot use them as and when needed.
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- Hybrid Capability
Azure allows users to create hybrid environments, thereby creating robust solutions. These solutions combine the benefits of both on-premise and cloud environments to build modern solutions for niche companies without high costs.
- Data Analytics
Any amount of data can be handled and analyzed simultaneously with Microsoft Azure. It offers additional solutions like Apache Hadoop and Excel to gain deeper insights into the workings of your enterprise mobility solutions.
With growing demands, new features and updates are regularly added to ensure applications' smooth functioning.
- Storage and Backup
You can store any data that you want with Azure. It can be simple text, structured data sets, or more. Importing and exporting are simple and quick.
There are standard protocols for sharing data so that the security and reliability of data can be ensured. The platform has built-in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) protection at the outermost layer.
DDOS protection gets working in case a DDOS attack gets detected. This is determined via a set specific and predefined threshold.
Data in cloud storage is encrypted using AES 256-bit encryption.
If you lose your data due to any unfortunate event, then there is no need to fret. Azure has multiple copies of your data across different data centers.
The default resiliency level is known as locally redundant storage (LRS). The backups can speed up data recovery, and the platform handles the switchover transparently.
- Community Support
There are a large number of companies using Azure infrastructure. The data centers are present in numerous countries, and the entire infrastructure is spread out.
This is higher than most other alternatives for building enterprise applications. This means lower latency for people from different countries working on Azure. Support plans are available in many other languages besides English.
How to Design and Build Robust Cloud Applications
Among the most crucial reasons for developing cloud applications is the ability to access these apps anytime and anywhere.
While developing cloud applications on Azure for enterprises, anyone with experience can agree that there are multiple ways for optimization. While some are basic and suitable for any general application, others are application-specific.
1. Planning:
You should be able to decide what you want. Choosing the wrong cloud operating model can lead to chaos and misunderstanding among the members of the IT department.
Increased time to market can increase the pressure on the entire organization and jeopardize the project. Once you know you have the prerequisites to begin, prioritize your goals. It would help if you had a rough timeline for the application's development and implementation.
Compare the available cloud operating models and develop a skill readiness plan before starting. You can start with IaaS to reduce the chances of mismanagement at the project's onset.
It should be a smooth task that disrupts all your current business processes.
You can talk to a Microsoft Technology Associate if you need help with how to proceed further. In addition, remember that everyone on the team will be working with Azure.
They should be comfortable adapting to newer job responsibilities, or it can affect the entire workflow. Good leadership is very crucial in motivating workers.
You can assign roles such as enterprise administrator, enterprise administrator (read-only), department administrator, department administrator (read-only), or account owner.
Limit the number of admin accounts or roles you set and protect those at an elevated level of accounts. This is because users with such roles can directly or indirectly read and modify all the resources available in your Microsoft Azure environment.
This increases your data risks. Instead, you can use just-in-time (JIT) access, an option for temporarily enabling permissions.
2. Development
To get started, you can use a template, and then later, you can add your app to an Azure AD tenant. The purpose of developing these applications is to provide good quality services to employees and partners through Active Directory and private network connections.
Knowing basic practices, such as storing static assets ( images, CSS files, JS files, and so on) to reduce file size can help build a high-performing application.
This is useful for companies offering ASP.NET development services. Azure Web Apps is a fully managed service that allows you to create and deploy enterprise-ready websites.
It provides powerful capabilities for Azure developers, such as built-in development operations and continuous integration with Visual Studio, GitHub, Online, staging, production support, and automatic patches.
This allows you to create web apps quickly. It can also be integrated with other cloud or on-premises systems.
The content delivery network (CDN) caches these assets at a point so as to get the maximum throughput during data transfer from one place to another.
When you co-locate the data stores and cloud services in one affinity group, you reduce the latency and boost the performance. Recently, the Azure data factory is now available in two more regions, namely, Norway East and UAE North.
Users can also provide it along with the Integration Runtime and SQL Server Integration Service (SSIS) Integration Runtime in these regions.
In such a case where you have to failover from another region, you can also use these regions for business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) reasons.
This way, the entire load is not on the application server in high traffic times. Azure Traffic Manager enables the geo-replication of saving the data.
If you have an application that does not need a previous state, you can use a distributed cache. There are other optimization options in Azure for files, videos, and the like that can also be utilized.
Read More: Benefits of Azure Web Apps In Developing Enterprise Apps Rapidly
3. Working on Architecture, Design, and Implementation
Besides these, the basic considerations in architecture, design, and implementation need to be remembered. The same principles you apply to other cloud platforms must be followed here.
Discuss with your team the right architecture style for your cloud-based app or solution. Based on the issues at hand, design patterns come in handy.
Also, knowing what computation and data storage technology stack you need to incorporate should also be known beforehand.
The backup feature in Azure allows users to have copies in multiple locations for both online and traditional applications.
This way, even if the hardware fails due to unexpected causes, the services are fail-safe. Other issues that can arise include power failures, natural calamities, and short circuits.
In addition, you must prefer small-sized virtual machines (VMs) to large ones until necessary for better disaster management.
One of the reasons behind this is that larger VMs with transient local storage is unsafe against failures.
4. Testing & Security
To protect sensitive data, you should first discover, classify, and label any such data. This will give you an idea of how to design the appropriate controls so critical information can be stored, processed, and transmitted securely.
Otherwise, even using the organization's latest technology systems, you are prone to cyber-attacks.
You can choose to use Azure Information Protection and the associated scanning tool when the sensitive data is located in multiple places, such as Azure, on-premises (previously), Microsoft Office 365, and many other similar locations.
Information protection can benefit users in the classification process, besides the labeling process. These processes are carried out for information stored in SQL databases.
Suppose you wish to monitor for any unauthorized transfer of data. You can use Azure Storage Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) and Azure SQL ATP to set alerts.
This can help you stay informed if there is a transfer of information to locations outside of enterprise visibility and control with malicious intent.
By getting information about a possible security breach, you can make timely decisions and prevent huge losses to the company.
Any information that has been classified and labeled falls under this category.
What's new
Staying updated in the software field is important. A new Azure Resource Manager–based deployment model for Cloud Services called Azure Cloud Services (extended support) has been recently introduced.
Suppose you are already an existing user of Azure Cloud Services with extended support.
In that case, you can now improve your regional resilience. Other available capabilities now include tags, policies, private links support, role-based access control (RBAC), and templates.
The Azure Service Manager–based deployment model has been renamed to Azure Cloud Services (classic) to avoid confusion later on for any existing or new users.
However, you can keep using the existing Azure Cloud Services (classic) deployment model for your enterprise apps as long as you want.
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To Sum It Up
Given the benefits of Azure, we are seeing a growing adoption among companies in sectors such as logistics, energy and utilities, manufacturing, and many more.
This also includes the critical applications that people were skeptical about earlier.
Once you have a clear picture of how everything works and is connected, you will clearly see how to achieve what you want.
However, you can take the advice of Microsoft Azure development experts from the Microsoft partner community too.
Azure provides numerous tools for your rescue in case you get stuck anywhere. However, your responsibility is still to ensure that you develop successfully working fail-safe applications.
A proper plan can go a long way in ensuring a faster time to market for your Azure cloud-based enterprise application. So, make sure you give due time to your team members when starting with a project idea.
