Azure on The IT Hollow

Azure Scale Sets

Mon, 03 Oct 2016 14:10:32 +0000

Azure scale sets are a way to horizontally increase or decrease resources for your applications. Wouldn’t it be nice to provision a pair of web servers behind a load balancer, and then add a third or fourth web server once the load hit 75% of capacity? Even better, when the load on those web servers settles down, they could be removed to save you money? This is what an Azure scale set does. Think of the great uses for this; seasonal demand for a shopping site, event promotions that cause a short spike in traffic, or even end of the month data processing tasks could automatically scale out to meet the demand and then scale in to save money when not needed.

Get Started with Azure Automation

Mon, 19 Sep 2016 14:15:50 +0000

Microsoft Azure has a neat way to store and run code right from within Microsoft Azure called “Azure Automation”. If you’re familiar with Amazon’s Lambda service, Azure Automation is similar in many ways. The main difference is that in Azure, we’re working with PowerShell code instead of Python or Node.js.

Create An Azure Automation Account

To get started, the first thing that we need to do is to setup an Azure Automation Account. In your Azure instance, browse for “Automation Accounts” and then click Add. Give the account a name and a subscription that the PowerShell commands should run under. As with any Azure objects, select a resource group or create your own and then select a location. The last setting is to decide whether or not the account with be an “Azure Run As” account. If you select “Yes” then the account will have access to other Azure Resources within your instance. For our examples, this account should be a “run as” account.

Microsoft Azure Portals

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 14:05:06 +0000

If you’re getting started with Microsoft Azure, you may feel confused about where things are located. One of the reasons for this confusion is the current use of multiple portals. It’s hard enough to learn how subscriptions work, how to access the resources through PowerShell and all of those new concepts without having to navigate different sites. This post should shed some light on what the portals are and how they’re used.

Azure Cloud Services

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 14:00:55 +0000

Azure provides a Platform-as-a-Service offering called a “Cloud Service.” Instead of managing every part of a virtual machine (the middle-wear and the application) it might be desirable to only worry about the application that is being deployed. An Azure cloud service allows you to just focus on the app, but does give you access to the underlying virtual machine if you need to use it.

So what makes up an Azure Cloud Service? There are two main types of virtual machines that are deployed through a cloud service; web roles and worker roles. Web roles are Windows servers with IIS installed and ready to use on them. Worker roles are Windows servers without IIS installed. In addition to the Windows instances that will be deployed, a cloud service also includes a load balancer that will automatically load balance the web roles, and an IP Address will be assigned to the load balancer. One thing to note is that the web server roles have an agent installed on them as well so that the load balancer can determine if the server is working correctly and if it needs to remove a server from the load balancer.

Azure Network Interfaces

Tue, 06 Sep 2016 14:05:44 +0000

Azure allows you to manage network interfaces as an object that can be decoupled from the virtual machine. This is important to note, because when you delete your virtual machine, the Network Interface will still be in the Azure Portal. This NIC and all of it’s settings will still exist for reuse if you wish. This would include keeping the Public IP Address that is associated with it, subnets, and Network Security Groups.

Deploying Virtual Machines in Microsoft Azure

Tue, 23 Aug 2016 14:01:28 +0000

Congratulations! If you’ve made it this far in the Microsoft Azure Series, you’re finally ready to start deploying virtual machines in Microsoft Azure. Let’s face it, the whole series has led up to this post because most of you are probably looking at getting started in Azure with the virtual machine. It’s familiar and can house applications, databases, data or whatever you’ve been housing in in your on premises data center. If you’re trying to benchmark Azure with you’re own data center apps, virtual machines are probably where you’ll spend your time. As you learn more about the the platform, Azure’s PaaS offerings might be more heavily used to prevent you from having to manage those pesky operating systems but for now we’re focusing on the VM.

Get Started with Azure PowerShell

Mon, 15 Aug 2016 14:35:02 +0000

Microsoft Azure has its own command line that can be used to script installs, export and import configurations and query your portal for information. Being a Microsoft solution, this command line is accessed through PowerShell.

Install Azure PowerShell

Using PowerShell with Microsoft Azure is pretty simple to get up and going. The first step to getting started is to install the Azure PowerShell modules. Open up your PowerShell console and run both “Install-Module AzureRM” and then “Install-Module Azure”.

Azure Storage Accounts

Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:05:47 +0000

Azure storage accounts provide a namespace in which to store data objects. These objects could be blobs, file, tables, queues and virtual machine disks. This post focuses on the pieces necessary to create a new storage account for use within Azure Resource Manager portal.

Setup

To setup a storage account go to the Azure Resource Manager Portal, select storage accounts and then click the “Add” button. From there you’ll have some familiar settings that will need to be filled out such as a unique name for the account, a subscription to use for billing, a resource group for management, and a location for the region to be used. The rest of this article explains the additional settings shown in the screenshot below.

Create Azure VPN Connection

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 14:05:37 +0000

Unless you’re starting up a company from scratch, you probably won’t host all of your workloads in a public cloud like Microsoft Azure. If you’re building a hybrid cloud, you probably want to have network connectivity between the two clouds and that means a VPN. Microsoft Azure uses a Virtual Network Gateway to provide this connectivity.

NOTE: As of the writing of this blog post, Microsoft has two portals that can be used to provide cloud resources. The Classic portal and the Azure Resource Manager portal. This post focuses on setting up a VPN tunnel using the new Azure Resource Manager portal.

Azure Network Security Groups

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 14:05:32 +0000

An Azure network security group is your one stop shop for access control lists. Azure NSGs are how you will block or allow traffic from entering or exiting your subnets or individual virtual machines. In the new Azure Resource Manager Portal NSGs are applied to either a subnet or a virtual NIC of a virtual machine, and not the entire machine itself.

NOTE: At the time of this post, Azure has a pair of Azure portals, including the classic portal where NSGs are applied to a virtual machine, or the Resource Manager Portal where NSGs are applied to a VNic of a virtual machine.

Setup Azure Networks

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 14:05:16 +0000

Setting up networks in Microsoft Azure is pretty simple task, but care should be taken when deciding how the address space will be carved out. To get started lets cover a couple of concepts about how Azure handles networking. To start we have the idea of a “VNet” which is the IP space that will be assigned to smaller subnets. These VNets are isolated from each other and the outside world. If you want your VNet to communicate with another VNet or your on-premises networks, you’ll need to setup a VPN tunnel. You might be wondering, how do you do any segmentation between servers without having to setup a VPN then? The answer there is using subnets. Multiple subnets can be created inside of a VNet and security groups can be added to them so that they only allow certain traffic, sort of like a firewall does.

Azure Resource Groups

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 14:05:36 +0000

An Azure resource group is a way for you to, you guessed it, group a set of resources together. This is a useful capability in a public cloud so that you can manage permissions, set alerts, built deployment templates and audit logs on a subset of resources. Resource groups can contain, virtual machines, gateways, VNets, VPNs and about any other resource Azure can deploy.

Most items that you create will need to belong to a resource group but an item can only belong to a single resource group at a time. Resources can be moved from one resource group to another.

Azure Subscriptions

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 14:12:30 +0000

Azure is a great reservoir of resources that your organization can use to deploy applications upon and the cloud is focused around pooling resources together. However, organizations need to be able to split resources up based on cost centers. The development team will be using resources for building new apps, as well as maybe an e-commerce team for production uses. Subscriptions allow for a single Azure instance to separate these costs, and bill to different teams.