Microsoft Azure

It provides a range of cloud services, including compute, analytics, storage and networking.

Microsoft Azure, formerly known as Windows Azure, is Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform.

It provides a range of cloud services, including compute, analytics, storage and networking.

The Azure platform aims to help businesses manage challenges and meet your organizational goals.

It support all industries — including e-commerce, finance and a variety of Fortune 500 companies —
and is compatible with open source technologies.

Azure supports a wide variety of operating systems, languages, frameworks, databases, and devices, so you can develop using the tools and technologies you are comfortable and familiar with.

Some Azure Components we work on as:

Azure App Service is a fully managed “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) that integrates Microsoft Azure Websites, Mobile Services, and BizTalk Services into a single service, adding new capabilities that enable integration with on-premises or cloud systems.
Azure App Service gives users several capabilities:
  • Provision and deploy Web and Mobile Apps in seconds
  • Build engaging iOS, Android, and Windows apps
  • Automate business processes with a visual design experience
Azure App Service enables you to build and host web apps, mobile back ends, and RESTful APIs in the programming language of your choice without managing infrastructure. It offers auto-scaling and high availability, supports both Windows and Linux, and enables automated deployments from GitHub, Azure DevOps, or any Git repo. It is a fully managed to compute platform that is optimized for hosting websites and web applications.
  • Supports Windows and Linux platforms
  • Built-in auto scale and load balancing
  • High availability with auto-patching
  • Continuous deployment with Git, Team Foundation Server, GitHub, and Visual Studio Team Services
  • Supports WordPress, Umbraco, Joomla! and Drupal
Microsoft Azure Functions acts a modern serverless architecture delivering event driven cloud computing and configured to comply with application development. With the help of Azure functions you can author and execute snippets of code in the cloud without the hassle of managing the web servers or containers. It lets you run small pieces of code and the developer doesn’t have to worry about the infrastructure of the platform on which it is executed.
Features of Azure Functions:
1. Intuitive, browser-based user interface: Azure Functions has an intuitive, browser-based user interface to respond to events generated by Event Hubs, HTTP Requests, Timers, Azure Queues, Table Storage, Blob Storage, etc.
2. Variety of programming languages: We have the freedom to choose the programming language. The service accepts a variety of programming languages like C#, F#, Node.js, Python, PHP or Java. You can utilize the programming model for a number of activities such as building HTTP-based API, communicating with other servers or orchestrating complex workflows.
3. Capabilities for implementing code: Being event driven, the application platform has capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in any third-party service or on-premise system.
4. Compute-on-demand: This delivery model ensures that computing resources are available to the users as per their demand. It is the user’s enterprise or cloud service provider that usually maintains these resources.
5. Supports Continuous Deployment and Integration: Even though Azure Functions is serverless architecture, it still supports Continuous Deployment and Continuous Integration. This is done through through GitHub, Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services and other development tools, such as Xcode, Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA.
6. Easy integration with Azure and 3rd-party services: Azure Functions offers integration with a number of Azure services apart from several third-party services (like Azure Notification Hubs, Azure Event Grid, Azure Event Hub, Azure Service Bus, Azure CosmosDB, Azure Storage, etc.) in many of the services where you need to run code snippets.
7. Portable Runtime: Microsoft has made Functions Runtime portable, so it is easier to build and deploy serverless applications on any public cloud or your own internal network.
8. Implement custom features: It is easier to implement custom features with this platform because runtime, templates, UI and underlying WebJobs SDK are all open source projects. 9. Pay as you use model: You need to pay only for the time the code is run, giving you the freedom to scale up and down as per requirement. This is calculated by calculating the amount of time the functions run in a particular billing cycle. And this way, you don’t have to worry about resource management.
Azure API Management is a reliable, secure and scalable way to publish, consume and manage API’s running on Microsoft Azure platform.  Azure API Management provides all essential tools required for an end-to-end management of API’s.  It ensures optimal performance of the API’s, tracks and enforces usage, authentication, and more. Azure API Management is primarily used to provide a central interface to create, provision and manage API for web and cloud applications and services.
With Azure API Management user can;
  • Monitor the health of APIs, identifying errors, configure throttling, rate limits and more on each API.
  • Provides insight into the utilization of APIs
  • Creating and managing user roles and defining end to end API usage policies
  • Provides a central interface to consolidate and manage thousands of API’s across multiple platforms.
  • Provide an authentication and access control mechanism to manage and ensure security on API access and utilization
We can run business workflow in Azure using the Logic App service. The Logic App is a logical container for one workflow you can define using triggers and actions. A trigger can instantiate a workflow, which can consist of one or many activities (actions). For instance, you can trigger a workflow by sending an HTTP request or schedule a workflow every hour to retrieve data from a public website. Azure Logic Apps is a cloud service that helps you schedule, automate, and orchestrate tasks, business processes, and workflows when you need to integrate apps, data, systems, and services across enterprises or organizations.
It consists of several components.
  • Logic Apps RP – Reads the workflow definition and breaks down into a composition of tasks with dependencies.
  • Logic Apps Runtime – Distributed compute/workers are coordinated to complete tasks on-demand.
  • Connection Manager – Manages connection configuration, credentials, and token refreshment.
  • Connector Runtime – API abstraction via Open API descriptions.
For developing quality applications efficiently in organizations, it’s clear that DevOps has become increasingly critical to a team’s success and integrating with the cloud is the best possible way to increase that success rate. DevOps is a methodology or a practice that brings together development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams for deploying efficient applications while shortening the development life cycle overall.
Azure DevOps comes with two options:
1. Azure DevOps Services:
  • It is a cloud offering.
  • It offers two options for scaling and scoping data: organizations and projects.
  • You can connect over the public network.
  • The access level must be assigned to each user.
2. Azure DevOps Server:
  • It is an on-premise offering.
  • It offers three options for scaling and scoping data: deployment, project collections, and projects.
  • You can connect to the intranet server.
  • Access levels must be set based on the license.
Application Insights, a feature of Azure Monitor, is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for developers and DevOps professionals.
What does Application Insights monitor?
  • Request rates, response times, and failure rates – Find out which pages are most popular, at what times of day, and where your users are. See which pages perform best. If your response times and failure rates go high when there are more requests, then perhaps you have a resourcing problem.
  • Dependency rates, response times, and failure rates – Find out whether external services are slowing you down.
  • Exceptions – Analyse the aggregated statistics, or pick specific instances and drill into the stack trace and related requests. Both server and browser exceptions are reported.
  • Page views and load performance – reported by your users' browsers.
  • AJAX calls from web pages – rates, response times, and failure rates.
  • User and session counts.
  • Performance counters from your Windows or Linux server machines, such as CPU, memory, and network usage.
  • Host diagnostics from Docker or Azure.
  • Diagnostic trace logs from your app – so that you can correlate trace events with requests.
  • Custom events and metrics that you write yourself in the client or server code, to track business events such as items sold or games won.
What are the benefits of using Application Insights?
  • You can monitor your live Sitecore application.
  • It will automatically detect performance anomalies.
  • This provides powerful analytics tools to help you diagnose issues and provide an understanding of your website.
  • Help continuously to improve performance and usability.

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