The Developer's Guide To Azure: Second Edition

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The key takeaways are that Azure provides a variety of services that allow developers to build scalable applications without having to manage infrastructure. It also discusses the different deployment models of cloud computing.

The different types of cloud computing discussed are public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud.

The main services provided by Azure that are discussed include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Specific Azure services mentioned include compute, storage, networking, databases, and the Azure Marketplace.

The Developer’s

Guide to Azure
Second Edition
PUBLISHED BY
Microsoft Press
A division of Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, Washington 98052-6399

Copyright © 2018 by Microsoft Corporation

All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

Microsoft Press books are available through booksellers and distributors worldwide. If you need
support related to this book, email Microsoft Press Support at mspinput@microsoft.com. Please tell us
what you think of this book at http://aka.ms/tellpress.

This book is provided “as-is” and expresses the author’s views and opinions. The views, opinions and
information expressed in this book, including URL and other Internet website references, may change
without notice.

Some examples depicted herein are provided for illustration only and are fictitious. No real association
or connection is intended or should be inferred.

Microsoft and the trademarks listed at http://www.microsoft.com on the “Trademarks” webpage are
trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. All other marks are property of their respective
owners.
Chapter 1: The Developer’s Guide to Azure ........................................................................................... 1
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................... 2
Information technology as a utility, not a burden ................................................................................................. 2
Computing as a utility ....................................................................................................................................................... 2
Cloud computing deployment types ............................................................................................................................... 4
The public cloud .................................................................................................................................................................. 4
The private cloud................................................................................................................................................................. 4
The hybrid cloud ................................................................................................................................................................. 4
Demystifying the types of cloud computing ................................................................................................................ 4
Infrastructure as a service ................................................................................................................................................ 5
Platform as a service .......................................................................................................................................................... 5
Function as a service .......................................................................................................................................................... 6
Software as a service.......................................................................................................................................................... 6
Why Azure? ................................................................................................................................................................................ 6
Azure has global reach ..................................................................................................................................................... 8
Azure is extremely resilient ............................................................................................................................................. 8
Azure is compliant with almost every industry ....................................................................................................... 9
Azure focuses on capabilities for developers .......................................................................................................... 9
Azure is open and supports the frameworks of your choice ............................................................................. 9
You can monitor your Azure services on the go ................................................................................................. 10
We are here if you need help .......................................................................................................................................... 10
Chapter 2: Getting started with Azure .................................................................................................. 11
Your IDEs and editors are welcome ............................................................................................................................... 11
Use the Azure command-line interface for scripting ............................................................................................. 11
Run anything on Azure ....................................................................................................................................................... 12
What about costs? ........................................................................................................................................................... 12
Selecting the right Azure services .................................................................................................................................. 12

ii Contents
Where to host your application.................................................................................................................................. 12
What to use when? .......................................................................................................................................................... 17
Making your application faster ....................................................................................................................................... 18
Azure Content Delivery Network ............................................................................................................................... 18
Azure Redis Cache ........................................................................................................................................................... 18
Azure Traffic Manager .................................................................................................................................................... 19
Where to store your data .................................................................................................................................................. 20
Chapter 3: Adding intelligence to your application ............................................................................ 24
Azure Search ........................................................................................................................................................................... 24
Azure Cognitive Services.................................................................................................................................................... 25
Azure Bot Service .................................................................................................................................................................. 25
Using events and messages in your application ...................................................................................................... 26
Azure Service Bus ............................................................................................................................................................. 26
Azure Event Hubs ............................................................................................................................................................. 27
Azure IoT Hub.................................................................................................................................................................... 27
Azure Event Grid ............................................................................................................................................................... 27
What to use when? .......................................................................................................................................................... 28
Chapter 4: Securing your application .................................................................................................... 29
Azure Active Directory ........................................................................................................................................................ 29
Azure API Management................................................................................................................................................. 29
Azure Key Vault ................................................................................................................................................................. 30
Azure DDoS protection .................................................................................................................................................. 30
Azure Web Application Firewall ................................................................................................................................. 30
Default encryption of data ........................................................................................................................................... 31
Chapter 5: Where and how to deploy your Azure services ................................................................ 32
The DevOps mind-set ......................................................................................................................................................... 32
Azure Resource Manager Templates ....................................................................................................................... 33
Azure Service Fabric ........................................................................................................................................................ 33
Containers in Azure ......................................................................................................................................................... 34
Azure Stack ......................................................................................................................................................................... 34
Where to deploy, when? .................................................................................................................................................... 35
Chapter 6: A walk-through of Azure ..................................................................................................... 36
Walk-through #1: the Azure portal ............................................................................................................................... 36
Tiles in the Azure portal ................................................................................................................................................. 36
Creating a new virtual machine .................................................................................................................................. 38
Walk-through #2: developing a Node.js web app with MongoDB on Azure ............................................... 42
Creating the web app and database using the Azure portal .......................................................................... 42
Walk-through #3: create a backend for your mobile app with Azure ............................................................. 50

iii Contents
Create a mobile app through the Azure portal .................................................................................................... 50
Additional features and moving to production ................................................................................................... 54
Chapter 7: Using the Azure Marketplace .............................................................................................. 55
How can the Azure Marketplace help me as a developer? .................................................................................. 55
Azure Solutions ................................................................................................................................................................. 55
Summary and where to go next ......................................................................................................... 56
Keep learning with an Azure free account ........................................................................................ 56
About the authors .................................................................................................................................... 57

iv Contents
1

The demand for software and related services today is greater than ever
before and this trend will only continue – exponentially so – as applications
of all sorts more and more become a part of every aspect of our daily lives.
You, as a developer, are the “magician” who is bringing this digital
revolution to your users and that’s not easy. Besides creating the unique
tangible features that your software offers, there are so many behind-the-
scenes elements that you need to take care of: your applications need to
be highly available, performant all over the world, function seamlessly on
a wide range of devices, be secure and be able to run at massive scale for
a reasonable price. These challenges are common across most software
and most industries. The solutions, however, are ephemeral things that
we keep reinventing, and they can be difficult and costly to build and
maintain.

We created The Developer’s Guide to Azure to help you on your journey to the cloud, whether you’re
just considering making the move or you’ve already decided and are underway. This eBook was
written by developers for developers. And it is specifically meant to give you, as a developer,
a fundamental knowledge of what Azure is all about, what it offers you and your organisation
and how to take advantage of it all.

The second half of the guide walks you through scenarios such as a tour of the Azure Portal and
creating a Virtual Machine. We also discuss developing and deploying a web application that
uses Node.js and MongoDB. We cover typical tasks such as CI/CD (Continuous Integrations and
Continuous Deployment), staging environments, scaling, logging and monitoring. We wrap up
by creating a backend for your mobile application that includes authentication and offline
synchronisation.

1 CH A P TER 1 | The Developer’s Guide to Azure


Introduction
There are countless books, articles, papers, blog posts and so on that espouse the virtues of cloud
computing, and you can find zetabytes worth of information that explain what cloud computing is in
a technical sense. But before getting into any of that, you need to ask a couple of simple questions:
why should I make the move to the cloud at all? How will it benefit me, my team, my company?

Information technology as a utility, not a burden


Cloud computing is computing as a utility. What do we mean by this? To help you visualise it,
consider something else that’s ubiquitous in your life: electricity.

Who today would think that having a mini-generating plant outside each home and business would
be an efficient model for the distribution of electric power? We are accustomed to simply flipping
a switch to turn on a light and then we go about doing what we need to do; you certainly would never
dream of having to buy, install and maintain all of the equipment needed to illuminate your home or
office. Instead, you pay your local electric company for the power you consume every month and you
never need to concern yourself with the physics of generating electricity, dealing with the capital
expense, maintaining the equipment, repairing it after storms – nothing. Just flip the switch and be
productive at something else.

Well, just as you neither need nor want to know exactly how electricity is delivered to your house,
neither do you need to know exactly how the computing power and services that you consume in
the cloud are made available to you. Someone else takes care of that for you. Thus, first and foremost,
moving your compute, storage and network to the cloud provides ease of use, just like turning on
a lamp. And you pay only for what you use, in the same manner as you pay only for the electricity
you use to power your home.

Of course, moving beyond our analogy, the cloud offers many more specific benefits for your IT
operations, like scalability and the ability to use intelligent services like search and facial recognition
in your applications, to name just two.

Computing as a utility
So, ultimately, you can think of cloud services such as Azure as computing as a utility. Of course,
Azure offers far more in the way of products and services than the local electric utility does, so cloud
computing can sometimes be difficult to clearly define. In fact, some say that the cloud is basically
just using somebody else’s computers, which is technically true, but the cloud is so much more:

The cloud is a system that provides robust, resilient, intelligent services and
compute resources at infinite, elastic, global scale.

Let’s break that down:

The cloud and Azure provide services that help you to accomplish so many things: from the mundane,
such as adding Search to your application, to the more exotic, such as implementing Continuous
Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) workflows. You can automatically tune your
database or set up push notifications to mobile devices, easily and quickly. These are just a few
examples of some common things that developers have created for themselves over and over again,
but are now available as a service. This makes it possible for you to use these services with very little
effort – almost like flipping a light switch! You can then focus on the pieces of your application that
make it unique; the features that provide real added value for your users.

2 CH A P TER 1 | The Developer’s Guide to Azure


Besides services, the cloud offers compute resources in the form of Virtual Machines (VMs),
containers, databases and so on. You can use these to host applications or to provide a complete
infrastructure for your users.

As we stated a moment ago, the power of the cloud is that services and resources are incredibly
robust and resilient. It is very unlikely that they will fail to run. This is because the cloud is smart.
It is self-healing and, as is the case with Azure, there are datacentres all over the world, filled with
tens of thousands of servers. If one server fails, another takes over. If an entire datacentre were to
fail (a highly unlikely scenario in and of itself), another would take over. All of this is possible because
of the massive scale of the cloud.

One of the most compelling arguments in favour of the cloud is that you can scale-up your services
and resources almost infinitely, and certainly to a degree that you simply can’t do with on-premises
resources, unless you’re prepared to spend enormous sums of money on capital equipment and
staffing to administer it all. And, you can scale globally. You can put your services anywhere in the
world so that you can provide a performant experience to your users, regardless of where they are.
It also means that you can keep your data where you need it to be.

Perhaps most important, though, when you use cloud resources, you can scale-back your services
and resources when there is no longer high demand. Returning again to our electric utility analogy,
if you’re having many friends and relatives to your house for a party, you’re going to turn on a lot
of lights inside and outside the house, use your microwave oven frequently, turn on some music and,
generally, consume more electricity. But when the party is over and your guests have left, your power
usage returns to normal, and so does your billing. It’s the same thing when you take advantage of the
cloud and Azure: you pay only for what you use, not for what you might need when usage is high.

More information To learn about the Azure portal and create your first VM, go to
https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/virtual-machines/windows/quick-create-portal.

In addition to massive scalability, off-the-shelf intelligent services and pay-per-use efficiency, the
cloud offers increased security.

The cloud is used by millions of people, 24×7, worldwide; of course, it is attacked by many people,
as well. Reputable and experienced cloud providers like Microsoft know the usage patterns of normal
users versus those of malicious actors. This means that it knows how to protect against both the
most common and most unique attacks out there. Intelligent monitoring tools, machine learning
algorithms and artificial intelligence give cloud providers the ability to detect attacks in real time
and stop them in their tracks.

Decades of experience in security and massive-scale traffic, combined with top industry security
expertise, make the cloud a much more secure environment than any on-premises datacentre.

More information To read more about how Azure secures your applications and data,
go to How Azure Security Centre detects DDoS attack using cyber threat intelligence,
Azure Security Overview and How Microsoft deals with cybercrime.

We’ve briefly explored the question of why you want to begin the migration to the cloud and Azure.
Now, let’s examine the cloud’s major components, what they do and how they fit into the grand
scheme.

3 CH A P TER 1 | The Developer’s Guide to Azure


Cloud computing deployment types
The cloud offers several levels of products and services, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and
platform as a service (PaaS), but before we get to those, let’s step back and look at the three basic
types of cloud platforms: public, private and hybrid. These have rapidly become modern technology
buzzwords. Let’s demystify them.

The public cloud


In the public cloud model, you don’t own any hardware; your cloud vendor is responsible for
purchasing and maintaining all hardware. The public cloud consists of all of the services and compute
resources that you do not own yourself, but that you use from your cloud provider. The provider
is responsible for keeping everything running and adhering to Service-Level Agreements (SLAs).
You pay for what you use, not for what you own.

The private cloud


With a private cloud, you own all of the hardware or, at least, have complete control over it.
The hardware that runs your services and houses your data is somewhere in your on-premises
datacentre. Of course, this complete control comes at a price: you must purchase and maintain
everything. You pay for what you own, not for what you use.

But, how do you set up a private cloud platform in a traditional on-premises datacentre? Fortunately,
Azure provides a unique solution designed specifically to work in this environment: Azure Stack. In
a nutshell, Azure Stack is your own private instance of Azure in a box that you can run in your on-
premises datacentre.

Running services in a private cloud is not the same as running services in your on-premises
datacentre. Azure Stack offers all of the advantages of Azure, including intelligent services that you
can use in your applications, all within the confines of your on-premises datacentre. Thus, if for special
security or governance reasons you need to keep certain operations “close to home” in your on-
premises datacentre, you can still enjoy all of the benefits offered by Azure and the cloud paradigm.

The hybrid cloud


The hybrid cloud model is, as its name implies, a mixture between the public and the private cloud.
You can use public cloud services that use resources in your private cloud and vice versa. In Azure,
you could run an application in an Azure Web App that connects to an on-premises database using
Azure Hybrid Connections. This opens a lot of possibilities. You control where your applications and
data are while still gaining the benefits of using intelligent cloud services.

Azure provides solutions for all cloud computing deployment types. This gives businesses more
freedom to use Azure where and how they want to. And they can determine the amount of control
that they want to have over their applications and data.

Demystifying the types of cloud computing


Within cloud computing, we can categorise services and resources into types. There are many
different cloud computing type definitions. The differences between the types are the amount of
control and responsibilities that you have versus the amount of time and effort you can spend on
adding business value to your company or customers. Figure 1-1 and Figure 1-2 illustrate how we
define cloud computing types for Azure.

4 CH A P TER 1 | The Developer’s Guide to Azure


Figure 1-1: Types of cloud computing explained

Figure 1-2: Examples of cloud-based offerings

Infrastructure as a service
With infrastructure as a service (IaaS [pronounced “eye-as”]), you are responsible for everything,
except the hardware. Azure takes care of all the hardware, such as the solid-state drives (SSDs),
network cabling, routers, power supplies, backup generators, cooling systems and so on. Services that
fall into this category include Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Virtual Networks and Azure Containers.

You take care of everything else. Your application, patching of the operating system (OS), logical
network configuration and even keeping antivirus programs on the machines up to date. This means
that you maintain total control over these elements. But, it also means that you spend a lot of time
and effort keeping the services and resources running and less time working on adding business value
to your core application products.

Platform as a service
Using the platform as a service (PaaS [pronounced “pahz”]) model, you are responsible for your
application and its configuration; Azure provides the OS and hardware. As Figure 1-1 demonstrates,
PaaS is an abstraction level higher than IaaS. You have far fewer responsibilities, but less direct control
over your hardware resources than with IaaS. Services that fall into the PaaS category include Azure
App Service, Azure SQL Databases, Azure Redis Cache and Azure Batch.

5 CH A P TER 1 | The Developer’s Guide to Azure


With PaaS, you can host your application, but this level also offers additional capabilities that
you can use out of the box, such as push notifications for mobile devices via Azure Mobile App
and automatically tuning your database in Azure SQL Database.

You deploy your application and configure it. You also do basic server configuration, like scaling the
pricing tier or the number of instances on which your app runs. Your application still runs on a server
somewhere, but you aren’t responsible for that server (nor do you have any control over it), which
means that you can spend much more time concentrating on adding business value to your
applications and less time keeping a server running.

Try it out Create a Node.js application with a MongoDB on Azure in this walk-through
at https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/app-service/app-service-web-tutorial-nodejs-
mongodb-app.

Function as a service
In function as a service (FaaS [pronounced “fahz”]), you are responsible only for your application and
your business logic. You don’t need to worry about scaling, the OS or any of the hardware. FaaS is
sometimes called serverless computing. Services in the FaaS category are Azure Functions, Azure Logic
Apps and Azure Event Grid.

In FaaS, all you need to do is create your application or weave together business logic and run it.
Scaling happens automatically. One of the more noteworthy benefits of FaaS is that you pay for the
resources you use only when the logic runs instead of paying for a service that is always on, waiting
for somebody to use it.

But FaaS does more than just host your application; it connects your logic to triggers and sources.
Outside sources such as Azure Storage Queues or WebHooks can initiate Azure Functions or Logic
Apps and provide them with data to process. You do not need to write the activating logic or set up
the plumbing to connect to external data stores or services, meaning you can focus on your logic and
customer-facing features.

Software as a service
With software as a service (SaaS [pronounced “sass”]), you need only concern yourself with
configuring the software – nothing else. Indeed, SaaS is the highest abstraction level of the cloud
computing types. Services in the SaaS category include Azure Cognitive Services and Azure IoT Suite.
Office 365 is another example of an Azure SaaS application suite, offering reliable business
applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more. And all of this is available
without you having to install or maintain anything.

With SaaS, the software is ready to use. All you need to do is configure it to your preferences and then
you are ready to go. You don’t write the software and you don’t need to think about deployment,
scaling, operating systems and hardware.

Why Azure?
So, you’re thinking the cloud might be what you need for your company to create incredible software
products and deliver the value and user experience your customers expect. Certainly, the Azure cloud
platform can help you accomplish that. With its vast resources and compute power, plus a wide array
of intelligent services, you can build highly scalable, dynamic apps and pay only for what you use. But
there are many cloud vendors out there today, each offering unique capabilities and products. So,
again, why Azure?

6 CH A P TER 1 | The Developer’s Guide to Azure


With Azure, you get the deep knowledge and expertise of Microsoft, a company that has been at the
forefront of both personal and enterprise-level computing and IT solutions for more than 40 years.
Microsoft has been designing, building and running massive-scale datacentre operations and
networks for its own purposes for decades. That experience and know-how is woven right into
the fabric of Azure. It’s at its very core.

Who uses Azure?


Adobe, Jet.com, Geico, GeekWire and DocuSign are just some examples of customers all around
the world that look to the Azure platform to help them achieve their business goals and deliver
more value to their customers. Some of those goals include the request for App Services to
Serverless, Artificial Intelligence to Azure IoT and even Media streaming. Let‘s look at some
interesting ways that customers have used the Azure platform to meet their business needs.
South Korean industrial giant Samsung creates everything from phones and televisions to washing
machines, major kitchen appliances and air conditioners. The company decided to use Azure to
increase the efficiency and robustness of its air conditioners by performing remote monitoring
and maintenance. The company uses Azure IoT Hubs to collect massive amounts of data sent
from sensors embedded in its air conditioners that monitor the status of the machines as well
as the environment in which they run. This data is captured in Azure SQL for real-time analysis.
Engineers can then use the information they extract to adjust the behaviour of the air conditioners,
resulting in average energy savings of 15 to 18% for its customers.
The Coca-Cola Company, one of the world’s most recognised brands, first introduced its eponymous
soft drink in 1886 and has been a global leader ever since. In 2012, the company launched Coca-Cola
Journey, a highly ambitious project and website whose purpose is to help Coca-Cola better connect
with a new generation of customers who more and more take their purchasing cues from non-
traditional marketing channels. The company wanted to take advantage of social media and a
Microsoft service called How-Old.net to create a fun and engaging interactive experience for users,
while simultaneously gaining insights into its customers. Based on the Cognitive Services technology,
How-Old.net analyses data extracted from facial imagery to establish the age and gender of
individuals. But Coca-Cola asked the Microsoft team to take the project a step beyond facial
recognition by using machine learning models to detect individual objects in pictures. For one month,
the site invited users to submit a photo of themselves and a Coca-Cola bottle with a visible logo to
see what happened. If the web app detected a bottle, the bottle’s age appeared and the page turned
red. Then, Coke fans were encouraged to share their experience on social media and to further
explore the Coca-Cola Journey site to learn more about the venerable contour bottle.
CarMax, the largest used-car retailer in the United States, redesigned its website using the Azure
platform services to deliver faster response to the 16 million people who visit its site every month.
Rather than “lift and shift” the site into an Azure IaaS environment, CarMax instead chose to rebuild
the site using the Azure PaaS offering. This made it possible for CarMax to modernise the site with
new cloud functionality, make it 100% mobile-friendly and, most importantly, move to a dynamic
DevOps development paradigm. CarMax is quickly moving toward a microservices architecture,
which will give the company the ability to scale and update parts of applications independently
of the other parts. Although this will take years to accomplish, choosing Azure as its development
foundation will help the auto retailer get to microservices faster.
NBC Sports works with Microsoft to deliver mega broadcast events. In 2016, the two companies
collaborated to broadcast the Summer Olympics from Rio de Janiero. NBC used Azure Media
Services to stream content from more than 50 Olympic events simultaneously, providing a 1080p
profile and covering a whopping 100 million unique users that consumed 2.71 billion minutes
of content from a broad range of devices and form factors. Media Services provided the scalability
and robustness to deliver this content flawlessly to the viewers.

7 CH A P TER 1 | The Developer’s Guide to Azure


Azure gives businesses, large and small, as well as government organisations, educational institutions
and any user of IT services the ability to more easily and cost-effectively manage their digital worlds,
both for themselves and their customers. In a nutshell, here’s how:

 Deliver cross-platform software experiences, like mobile, desktop, web and hybrid
experiences: Azure provides services with which you can implement these scenarios “out of the
box,” like Azure App Service, including Web App and Mobile App, and Mobile Centre and Visual
Studio Team Services for delivering and managing all application types.

 Deliver services wherever they need to be: Azure is unique in its breadth of deployment
options: the public cloud, hybrid solutions and Azure on-premises, in your own datacentre (via
Azure Stack). All of these options can provide massive scale at an affordable price, while keeping
your data where it needs to be.

 Deliver an intelligent, massive scale, data platform: Azure has many services that you can
use to capture, store, analyse and present your data. These are services like Azure SQL Databases,
Data Lake Store and Data Lake Analytics, HDInsight, Event Hubs, Cognitive Services and many
more. All of these services can create an affordable, intelligent and massively scalable data
platform that gives businesses the tools to extract valuable insights from the vast amount of data
being churned out today.

 Deliver high-quality software, fast: You need to test always and fail fast to deliver quality
software. With Azure, you can do so through integrated CI and CD mechanisms directly in services
like Web App or through Visual Studio Team Services. Features like App Services Deployment
Slots make it possible for you to deliver fast, with no downtime. And, to know that your app is
working as expected in production, Azure provides monitoring services, like Application Insights,
that let you know exactly how your app is doing and where you can improve.

Azure has global reach


With datacentres in more than 42 countries and regions around the globe, Azure‘s incredible
coverage offers many benefits. First, it can reduce any downtime your applications might experience
should an entire datacentre fail (an extremely low probability, in and of itself), because your
application can failover to another datacentre and continue to run almost as if nothing happened
at all. This can also reduce your disaster recovery costs.

If you use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to reduce latency, the chances are that there is an
Azure datacentre in close proximity to where your customers are and where you need to deliver
their content. Another benefit that Azure can offer with so many facilities in so many locations is that
you have a wider range of choices for data storage. This can help you to ensure that your company
remains in compliance with local or regional regulations and laws with respect to data sovereignty.

Microsoft continues to invest heavily in datacentre infrastructure and innovation through open-source
hardware development and novel new datacentre solutions such as the underwater datacentres from
project Natick.

Azure is extremely resilient


Azure is an intelligent, self-monitoring and self-healing platform that you can rely on to keep your
applications up and available and running well. To back that up, all Azure services operate under
comprehensive SLAs that define their performance in specific terms. SLAs range from 99.9%
(three nines) uptime to 99.99% (four nines). This means that Azure services are extremely resilient
and reliable. Should your services fail to perform to the governing SLA’s specifications, you might
be eligible for a discount of up to 100% of the service costs on your Azure invoice.

8 CH A P TER 1 | The Developer’s Guide to Azure


To make sure that your services remain at peak performance, Microsoft monitors the service health for
each individual Azure service in every datacentre around the world. These metrics are available for you
to monitor, as well, on the public Azure status page.

As we mentioned earlier, Microsoft has been operating datacentres and providing IT services at
massive scale since 1989. It has accumulated a lot of knowledge in that time. Today, Microsoft has
some of the best minds in the IT industry working continuously to keep Azure up and running so that
you can rely on it for hosting your services and storing your data. That’s why all of the Azure services
have SLAs to back that up.

Azure is compliant with almost every industry


Azure offers the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings of any cloud provider. The list of
compliances is huge and growing continually. Some of the standards to which Azure complies include
ISO 27001, HIPAA and SOC 3. Region-specific compliances include the EU-US Privacy Shield and
China DJCP.

For instance, by complying with the ISO 27001 certification, Microsoft guarantees that it implements,
monitors, maintains and continually improves its security standards for its global network of
datacentres as well as for the individual services in Azure.

More information For a complete listing of compliance statements, go to


https://www.microsoft.com/trustcenter/compliance/complianceofferings.

Azure even has a specific offering for US government customers called Azure Government, which
is basically a “special edition” of the Azure cloud that addresses the unique needs of government
entities. Azure Government is run separately from the Azure public cloud, in its own instance, meaning
that it runs on separate, dedicated servers on a completely separate and isolated infrastructure.

Azure focuses on capabilities for developers


Azure helps you, as a developer, to be more productive by providing much of the “plumbing” that you
would otherwise need to build yourself. With capabilities such as autoscaling and authentication/
authorisation tools, you can add advanced features and functionality to your applications with little
to no effort. You can integrate services like Azure Search or Cognitive Services that will enhance your
applications and please your users.

Azure is open and supports the frameworks of your choice


Write your applications in JavaScript and deploy them to Web App. Or, write them in Ruby, Django,
Java, PHP or .NET; whichever is your preferred environment. Azure has wide support for lots of
languages. You can bring your existing application or write one from scratch, and it will run in Azure.

Additionally, you can choose the ecosystem you prefer. Azure supports most operating systems,
like Linux and Windows, and you can script everything using Bash if you want. You can also run
your application how you want – using containers, Azure Service Fabric, App Services, Azure Stack
and so on.

After you have learnt how to use Azure with one toolset, you can use it with any other toolset.
The services and the Azure portal work the same for everything.

9 CH A P TER 1 | The Developer’s Guide to Azure


You can monitor your Azure services on the go
Are you the sort of person who likes to keep a constant eye on operations? With Azure, you can
monitor how your services are performing and fix issues that might arise by using the Azure mobile app.
This helpful app is designed to give you visibility into your resources even when you are not behind
your desk at your main computer. You can handle tasks like restarting a web app and stopping a virtual
machine. It also provides a full command-line interface (CLI) experience via Cloud Shell, making it
possible for you to do basically everything that you can do with the Azure portal.

Additionally, there are services in Azure that perform smart detections and recommendations for
your services and can send you alerts about them. These are things like detecting that a web app
is running slower than usual or informing you that an App Service scaled up automatically. Azure
Security Centre and Azure Monitor are some of the services that can alert you about these things
so that you never have to miss anything important.

We are here if you need help


There are lots of ways to get help with Azure if you need it.

You can buy a support plan, that gives you access to the Azure technical support teams and provides
other services like guidance based on best practices to design for the cloud or assistance in planning
your migration. Depending on your needs, you can buy a support plan that guarantees responses
from the technical support teams within 15 minutes.

Additionally, you can get help for free, 24×7, through many channels. You can tweet to
@AzureSupport or reach out to the support teams through MSDN forums, StackOverflow,
Reddit or the Microsoft Tech Community.

10 CH A P TER 1 | The Developer’s Guide to Azure


2

After some thoughtful deliberations, you’ve joined the Azure community


and now you want to get started building applications. What do you need?
Not much really. The most important thing to have is just a connection to
Azure to deploy your app. You can use the tools, applications and
frameworks of your choice.

Your IDEs and editors are welcome


Whatever you use to create or edit your applications in your on-premises environment, you can use
with Azure. Choose anything: from Notepad to Visual Studio Code, to Sublime Text, to Visual Studio,
to the code editors in the Azure portal. It’s your call!

Plug-ins are available for all the popular IDEs, giving you the ability to do things like publish directly
to Azure. And even if you prefer using a bare-bones tool like Notepad, you can still automate your
deployments to Azure using Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Delivery (CD) practices.

Use the Azure command-line interface for scripting


Azure provides a powerful command-line interface (CLI) with which you can do basically everything in
Azure. You can use the Azure CLI to start and stop virtual machines (VMs), to deploy your application
to an app in Azure Web App, to create new resources and everything else. It’s also very useful for
automating tasks and running them in your CI/CD pipelines.

You can use the Azure CLI available on the Azure portal in the Azure Cloud Shell, or locally, on your
machine, through the Azure CLI tooling. Another advantage is that you can apply your existing Bash
or Windows PowerShell expertise in the Azure CLI.

11 CH A P TER 2 | Getting started with Azure


Run anything on Azure
Azure is great for web applications and APIs. It’s also great as a host for desktop and mobile
applications. You could, for instance, use it to authenticate users in your desktop application or send
push notifications to your mobile app. No matter what scenario you have in mind, Azure can add
value to it.

What about costs?


Clearly, it’s important to know what things cost in Azure. To assist you in that, Microsoft offers the
Azure Pricing Calculator. With this handy tool, you select the services that you are going to use and
specify how much you anticipate using them, and the calculator will let you know what your monthly
and yearly bill will be. This, together with how much data you’ll use, determines your costs.

Note The Azure Pricing Calculator estimates costs for pay-as-you-go subscriptions.
There are other payment options for enterprises, partners and MSDN subscribers,
which can affect the costs of services.

You can also keep an eye on your costs using the Azure Billing APIs and Pricing alerts. You can take
advantage of these to gain insights into costs and spending trends so that you can control your costs.

Selecting the right Azure services


Azure provides a lot of services to help you build and run your applications. There are so many
services, in fact, that it can sometimes be a bit confusing to choose just the right services for your
scenario. Which ones should you pick as a developer? Let’s explore some of your options.

Where to host your application


The first choice you’ll need to make right out of the gate is where to host your application. Azure
offers several hosting options.

VMs
One of the ways to host your application is in a VM in Azure Virtual Machine. This provides you
with a lot of control over how you host your application, but you are responsible for maintaining the
environment, such as patching the operating system (OS) and keeping antivirus programs up to date.

You can, for instance, use an VM to test the latest preview version of Visual Studio, without getting
your machine “dirty”.

Azure Batch
If you need to run large-scale batch or high-performance computing (HPC) applications on VMs,
you can choose Azure Batch. Batch creates and manages a collection of up to thousands of VMs,
installs the applications you want to run and schedules jobs on the VMs. You do not need to deploy
and manage individual VMs or server clusters. Batch schedules, manages and auto-scales your jobs,
so you use only the VMs you need. Batch is a free service; you only pay for the underlying resources
consumed, such as the VMs, storage and networking.

Batch is well suited to run parallel workloads at scale such as financial risk models, media transcoding,
VFX and 3D image rendering, engineering simulations and many other compute-intensive
applications. Use Batch to scale out an application or script that you already run on workstations
or an on-premises cluster, or develop SaaS solutions that use Batch as a compute platform.

12 CH A P TER 2 | Getting started with Azure


Try it out Get up and running on Azure Batch in five minutes with these step-by-step
tutorials.

Containers
Containers are much more lightweight than VMs and you can start and stop them in a few
seconds. Containers also offer tremendous portability, which makes them ideal for developing
an app locally, on your machine, and then hosting it in the cloud, in test, and later in production.
You can even run containers on-premises or in other clouds – the environment that you use on your
development machine travels with your container, so your app always runs in the same ecosystem.

Just like VMs, containers provide you with a lot of control over your environment. You can install what
you need to run your applications. But, again, you are responsible for patching and maintaining the
OS that runs in the container and for ancillaries like antivirus programs.

Host containers with Azure Container Instances


You can host your container using Azure Container Instances. Using this service, you can quickly spin
up a container, without the need for a container orchestrator, like Kubernetes, and without having to
manage the resources that host the container.

The Container Instances service is billed per second, per virtual CPU, per gigabyte or by memory usage.

More information To learn more about Container Instances, go to Get started with
Azure Container Instances.

Host containers with Azure Container Service


Another way to host containers is by using Azure Container Service. With this service, you can
scale and manage your containers using orchestrators like Mesosphere DC/OS, Docker Swarm
or Kubernetes. This service is a great way to begin moving your containers to the cloud.

More information To learn more about Container Service, go to Get started with
Azure Container Service.

Azure Functions
With Azure Functions, you can write just the code you need for a solution without worrying about
building a full application or the infrastructure to run it. A function is a unit of code logic that is
triggered by an HTTP request, an event in another Azure service or based on a schedule. Input
and output bindings connect your function code to other services, like Azure Blob Storage, Azure
Cosmos DB and Azure Service Bus, with minimal code. Using Functions, you can build small pieces
of functionality quickly and host them in an elastic environment that automatically manages scaling.

Another thing that makes Azure Functions special is that you can choose to pay only for functions
that run, without having to keep compute instances running all month. This is also called serverless
because it requires only that you to create your application and not deal with any servers or even
scaling of servers.
You can write Azure Functions in C#, F#, Node.js, Java, PHP and a growing list of languages.

An example of an application that uses Functions is one that activates a function every time a new
image file is uploaded to Azure Blob Storage. The function would then resize the image and write
it to another Blob Storage account. The function signature for this example would look like this
(in C# script):

13 CH A P TER 2 | Getting started with Azure


public static void Run(Stream myBlob, string name, TraceWriter log, BlockBlob outputBlob) { }

Data from the Blob that triggered the function is passed into the function as the myBlob parameter,
which includes the Blob URL. You can use outputBlob output binding parameter to specify the Blob
to which to write the result. There’s no need to write the plumbing for connecting to Blob Storage,
you just configure it.

Try it out Create your first Azure Function using the Azure Portal.

Azure Logic Apps


You can orchestrate business logic with Logic Apps, automating a business process or integrating with
software as a service (SaaS) applications. Just like in Azure Functions, Logic Apps can be activated by
an outside source; for instance, a new message on an Azure Storage Queue. You weave together API
calls to connectors to create a (possibly complex) workflow that can involve resources in the cloud
and on-premises. Logic Apps has many available connectors to APIs, such as one for connecting to
Azure SQL Databases, to SalesForce, to SAP and so on. You can also expose your own APIs or Azure
Functions as connectors to use in a Logic App, making it possible for you to easily perform actions
against external systems in your workflow or have your Logic App be activated by one of them.

Just like Azure Functions, Logic Apps are serverless, are scaled automatically and you pay for them
only when it runs.

Here’s an example of a workflow in Logic Apps:

1. The Logic App is activated by an email containing a shipping order that arrives in Office 365.

2. Using the data in the email, the Logic App checks on the availability of the ordered item in
SQL Server.

3. The Logic App sends a text message to the customer’s phone using Twilio (the phone number
was also in the email), indicating that the order was received and the item has been shipped.

Try it out Get started with Azure Logic Apps.

Azure App Service


Alternatively, you can host your applications in one of the core service offerings in Azure: Azure App
Service. Azure App Service is a collection of hosting and orchestrating services that share features
and capabilities. For instance, all App Services have the capability to secure an application using
Azure Active Directory and can use custom domains.

Azure App Service comprises the following:

 Web App: Web App is one of the most widely used Azure services. You can use this to host
your web applications or APIs. A Web App is basically an abstraction of a web server, like Internet
Information Services (IIS) or Tomcat, that you use to host HTTP-driven applications.

Web App can host applications that are written in .NET, Node.js, PHP, Java or Python, and there
are extensions that you can use to run even more languages.

Try it out We walk you through a sample Node.js and MongoDB app in our example
section.

14 CH A P TER 2 | Getting started with Azure


 Web App for Containers: Web App for Containers helps you easily deploy and run
containerised web apps at scale. Just pull container images from Docker Hub or a private Azure
Container Registry and Web App for Containers will deploy the containerised app with your
preferred dependencies to production in seconds. The platform automatically takes care of OS
patching, capacity provisioning and load balancing.

Try it out We walk you through deploying a web app with a Docker formatted
container in our example section.

 Mobile App: Mobile App provides a backend for your mobile applications. You host an API in
Mobile App that your mobile applications connect with through the cross-platform client SDK.
This is available for iOS, Android, Windows and Xamarin for iOS and Android and Xamarin Forms.
Mobile App provides unique features like Offline Sync and Push Notifications that help you to
create a modern, well performing and secure mobile experience.

You can write your Mobile App backend in .NET or Node.js.

Try it out We walk you through creating a mobile backend in our example section.

Azure App Service Features


Azure App Service is one of the key services in Azure that you can use to host your applications. Each of
these services brings unique capabilities to the table, but they all share some common features:

Scaling
Azure App Service runs on App Service Plans, which are abstractions from VMs. One or more VMs run
your Azure App Service, but you don’t need to know which ones because Azure takes care of them.
You can, however, scale the resources that run your Azure App Service. You can either choose a higher
pricing tier (ranging from free to premium) or increase the number of application instances that are
running. You can even have Azure App Service automatically scale the number of instances for you,
based on a schedule or metrics like CPU, memory or HTTP queue length.

Deployment slots
This is a very useful feature of Azure App Service. You can deploy a new version of your application to
a deployment slot, where you can then test whether it works as expected before moving it into your
production slot. You can even use Azure’s Testing in Production feature to route a percentage of traffic
from your production app to a deployment slot. For instance, you could shunt 10% of your users to
the new version of your app in the deployment slot to see whether the new features are functioning
as expected and whether users are actually using them.

After you are satisfied with how the new version of your app is performing in the deployment slot,
you can carry out a swap, which exchanges the app in the deployment slot with that in your
production slot. You can also swap from a development slot to a staging slot, and then to the
production slot, as illustrated in Figure 2-1. Before doing this, the swap operation verifies that the
new version of your website is warmed up and ready to go. When this has been confirmed, the swap
operation switches the slots and your users now see the new version of the app, with no downtime.
If you want, you can also swap back, reverting the deployment of the new version.

15 CH A P TER 2 | Getting started with Azure


Figure 2-1: Swapping a deployment slot

You use deployment slots within an environment like Development, Test or Production. You don’t use
deployment slots as environments, because they all reside in the same App Service Plan, and you want
those to be separated for security, scaling, billing and performance.

You can swap deployment slots manually, through the Azure command-line interface (CLI) and
through the Azure Management API. This allows tools like Visual Studio Team Services to perform
swap operations during a release.

A deployment slot is another element of Azure App Service (like a Web App) that runs in the same
Azure App Service Plan, next to your original Azure App Service. Because deployment slots run in the
same Azure App Service Plan as your original Azure App Service, they don’t cost anything extra to use.

Continuous Delivery
To publish your application to App Services, you can use external services such as Visual Studio Team
Services, Jenkins or Octopus Deploy. You also can use the Continuous Delivery (CD) feature in App
Services. This makes it possible for you to create a build-test-release pipeline right in the App Service.
The process does the following:

1. Retrieves the latest source code from the repository that you indicate

2. Builds the code according a template that you pick (ASP.NET, Node.js and so on)
3. Deploys the app in a staging environment and load-tests it

4. Deploys the app to production after approval (you can indicate whether you want to use
a deployment slot)

Connect to on-premises resources


You can connect external resources such as data stores to your App Services. These resources do not
need to be located in Azure; they can be anywhere, such as on-premises, in your own datacentre.
You can connect to services on-premises through many mechanisms, depending on your
requirements. You can use Azure Hybrid Connections, Azure Virtual Networks and Azure ExpressRoute
to connect to on-premises resources.

Custom domains and Azure App Service certificates


When you spin up an app in Azure App Service, it exposes a URL – for example,
https://myazurewebsite.azurewebsites.net. Most likely, you will want to use your own custom domain,
which you can do by mapping that domain name to App Services. Here’s how to do that.

Additionally, you can ensure that your application is served over HTTPS by using a Secure Sockets
Layer (SSL) certificate. You can bring your own certificate or buy one directly from the Azure portal.

16 CH A P TER 2 | Getting started with Azure


When you buy an SSL certificate from the Azure portal, you buy an Azure App Service certificate,
which you can configure to be used by your custom domain bindings.

Try it out See how to purchase and configure a certificate in this walk-through.

App Service Environment


In a multi-tier web application, you often have a database or services that are used by your app in
Web App. Ideally, you want these services to be exposed only to the app and not to the internet.
Of course, the app itself is often internet-facing given that it provides the entry point for your users.

To isolate these support services from the internet, you can use an Azure Virtual Network. This service
wraps your support services and connects them to your app in Web App in such a way that the
support services are exposed only to the app, not to the internet. This article describes this service
in more detail and shows you how to use it.

Sometimes, you might want even more control. Maybe you want your app to be wrapped in a Virtual
Network so that you can control access to it. Perhaps you want it to be called by another app in
Web App and have it be a part of your backend. For this scenario, you can use an Azure App Service
Environment. This affords you a very high scale and gives you control over isolation and network
access. Note, though, that App Service Environment is available for App Services in the premium
pricing tiers only.

Note App Service Environment currently doesn’t work for Web App for Containers.

What to use when?


Even though App Service, Functions and Logic Apps often work hand in hand, each is designed with
specific application needs in mind.

Table 2-1 briefly outlines the categories of app services available and what purposes they can be used for.

Category Purpose Azure App Service type


Host applications Host web applications and APIs Web App and/or Web App
for Containers from App
Service
Host backend for mobile apps Mobile App from App
Service
Orchestrate processes Orchestrate a step in a process Functions
Orchestrate an entire process Logic Apps

Table 2-1: Which App Service should you use when

17 CH A P TER 2 | Getting started with Azure


Making your application faster
After your application is up and running in Azure, you want it to perform as well as it can.
Azure provides a range of services that can help you with that.

Azure Content Delivery Network


One of the Azure services that can help you to make your application faster is Azure Content Delivery
Network. You upload your static files – videos, images, JavaScript, CSS and even static HTML files –
to a data store such as Azure Blob Storage and then couple Azure Content Delivery Network to that.
Content Delivery Network will then take those static files and replicate them to hundreds of Points-of-
Presence (PoP) all over the world. All you need to do in your app is to change the reference to the
static files to a different URL. For example, where that reference previously might have been
~/images/image.png, it would now be https://example.azureedge.com/image.png. This is very
easy to do and improves the performance of your application in the following ways:

 It offloads serving content from your application. It is now served by Content Delivery Network,
thereby freeing up processing cycles for your application
 It brings static content physically closer to your users by distributing it to PoPs all over the world

You can benefit from Content Delivery Network in web applications, but also in mobile and desktop
applications.

An example of using Content Delivery Network is to serve videos for a mobile app. The videos can
be large and you don’t want to store them on the mobile device (nor do your users!). Using Content
Delivery Network, they are served from the PoP, which also improves performance, because it is close
to the user.

Try it out Get started with Azure Content Delivery Network.

Azure Redis Cache


Every modern application works with data. When you retrieve data from a data store like a database,
this typically involves scanning multiple tables or documents in some distant server, weaving the
results together and then sending the result to the requesting device. This, of course, takes time
and can frustrate and annoy your users.

To eliminate some of these “roundtrips,” you can cache data that doesn’t change often. This way,
instead of querying the database every time, you could retrieve some of the data from a cache, like
Azure Redis Cache. The benefit of the cache is that it stores data in a simple format such as key–value.
You don’t need to run a complex query to get this data, you just need to know the key to retrieve the
value. This can improve the performance of your application dramatically. Here’s how this workflow
operates:

1. The app needs some data and attempts to retrieve it from the cache.
2. If the data is not there, the app gets it from the database and also stores the data in the cache.

3. The next time the app is looking for that particular piece of data, it will find it in the cache, saving
a trip to the database.

Azure provides Cache-as-a-Service with Redis Cache. This is based on the open-source Redis project
and is now backed by Microsoft engineers and SLAs. It performs very well and has advanced options
like clustering and geo-replication.

18 CH A P TER 2 | Getting started with Azure


Try it out Get started with Azure Redis Cache.

Azure Traffic Manager


Many modern applications have users all over the world. Providing excellent performance for
everyone is challenging to say the least. The most obvious problem you need to deal with is latency.
Latency is the time it takes for a signal or a request to travel to a user. The further away users are from
your application, the more latency they experience.

Azure Traffic Manager scales across regions which helps to reduce latency and to provide users
a performant experience, regardless of where they are. Traffic Manager is an intelligent routing
mechanism that you put in front of, for instance, your Web App applications, all over the world.
Web App acts as endpoints, which Azure Traffic Manager monitors for health and performance.
As Figure 2-2 demonstrates, when a user accesses your application, Traffic Manager routes her
to the best performing Web App application in her vicinity.

Including Traffic Manager in your architecture is a great way to improve the performance of your
application.

Figure 2-2: Azure Traffic Manager directs traffic to the closest and best performing endpoint

19 CH A P TER 2 | Getting started with Azure


Where to store your data
Data is a very important aspect of any modern application and it comes in all shapes and sizes.
Azure provides many types of data stores that can help you to maintain and retrieve data in any
scenario. Table 2-2 presents the storage options available in Azure.
Table 2-2: Storage options in Azure

Data Lake Store


SQL Databases

PostgreSQL

Cosmos DB

Warehouse
SQL Data
MySQL

Queue
Table
Blob

Disk
File
Relational data X X
Object-relational data X
Unstructured data X X
Semi-structured data X
Queue messages X
Files on disk X
High-performance files on disk X
Store large data X X X X X
Store small data X X X X X X X X
Geographic data replication X X

Note You can use almost all of the storage options mentioned in this section
as activators and bindings for Azure Functions.

Let’s take a closer look at each storage option.

Azure SQL Databases


If you want to use tables with columns and rows to store data, Azure SQL Database is a great choice.
It is a relational database system that is similar to on-premises Microsoft SQL Server. Because SQL
Database runs in the cloud, it is fully managed, performant, scalable, automatically backed up and
has many advanced featured.

You can use SQL Database with your favourite tools, including SQL Server Management Studio and
the Entity Framework.

Here are some of its more advanced features:

 Geo-replication, which replicates data to other geographical regions in real time (Get started with
geo-replication)

 Dynamic data masking, which dynamically masks sensitive data for certain users at runtime
(Get started with dynamic data masking)

 Auditing, which provides a complete audit trail of all the actions that happen to the data
(Get started with Azure SQL Database auditing)

20 CH A P TER 2 | Getting started with Azure


Databases in SQL Database are extremely reliable and robust and offer a Service-Level Agreement
(SLA) that guarantees 99.99% uptime.

Azure Database for MySQL


MySQL is an open-source relational database system that is used by millions of applications, like
WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Now, MySQL is available as a managed database service in the
Azure Database for MySQL service. This means that you can get up and running quickly, without the
need to set up or maintain servers. Azure does it all for you. You get security and scalability right out
of the box. Also, the Database for MySQL service enjoys the same reliability as that of SQL Database,
providing an industry leading 99.99% uptime SLA.

Just as with SQL Database and Azure Database for PostgreSQL, incremental backups are made every
five minutes and full backups are performed every hour, which you can use to recover your data to
an earlier state as far back as 35 days.

Try it out Create and connect to a MySQL database in Azure.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL


Based on the popular PostgreSQL database technology, Azure Database for PostgreSQL provides
an object-relational database service. This is slightly different to relational database services in that
object-relational databases can store more complex data types, such as nested data types, and are
therefore more closely aligned to the object-oriented programming languages that we use in our
applications.

Database for PostgreSQL is a managed service that has the same characteristics as Database for
MySQL. You can scale it up and down, it is highly available (99.99% SLA) and it is automatically
backed up.

Try it out Create an Azure Database for PostgreSQL using the Azure CLI.

Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB is the new version and rebranding of DocumentDB – and more. Cosmos DB
is a new kind of database that is truly made for the cloud. Here are some of its key features:
 A 99.99% SLA that includes low latencies (less than 10 ms on reads; less than 15 ms on writes).

 Geo-replication, which replicates data to other geographical regions in real time (How to
distribute data globally with Azure Cosmos DB).

 Traffic Management, which sends users to the data replica to which they are closest.

 Limitless global scale; you pay only for the throughput and storage that you need.

 Automatic indexing of data. No need to maintain or tune the database anymore.

In addition to all of these features, Cosmos DB offers different APIs with which you can store and
retrieve data, including SQL, JavaScript, Gremlin, MongoDB and Azure Table Storage. Different APIs
handle data in different ways. You can use documents as data as well as unstructured tables, graphs,
blobs and so on. You use the API that fits your needs and Cosmos DB takes care of the rest.
You benefit from cloud-grade performance, scalability and reliability and still use the programming
model to which you’re accustomed.

21 CH A P TER 2 | Getting started with Azure


Try it out Get started with Azure Cosmos DB DocumentDB API.

Azure Storage
Another option you have for storing data is Azure Storage. This is one of the oldest and most reliable,
well performing services in Azure. Azure Storage offers five types of storage that all benefit from the
following shared features:

 Geo-redundancy that replicates data to different datacentres so that you can recover it in the
event that a disaster causes an individual datacentre to fail
 Encryption of data at runtime

 Custom domains

The four Azure Storage types are Blob, Queue, File and Disk (Figure 2-3).

Figure 2-3: Azure Storage services overview

Blob Storage
You can use Azure Blob Storage to store large unstructured data – literally, blobs of data. This can be
video, image, audio or text, or even virtual hard drive (VHD) files for VMs.

There are two types of Blobs: Page and Block Blobs. Page Blobs are optimised for random read
and write operations. These are perfect for storing a VHD. Block Blobs are optimised for efficiently
uploading large amounts of data. These are perfect for storing large video files that don’t change
often.

Try it out Get started with Azure Blob Storage.

Queue Storage
Azure Queue Storage is an unusual type of storage in that it is used to store small messages of data,
but its main purpose is to serve as a queue. You put messages in the queue and other processes
pick it up. This pattern decouples the message sender from the message processor and results in
performance and reliability benefits. Azure Queue Storage is based on the Microsoft Message
Queueing that you can find in previous versions of Windows.

Try it out Get started with Azure Queue Storage.

22 CH A P TER 2 | Getting started with Azure


File Storage
You can use Azure File Storage as a drive from which to share files. Its uses the Server Message Block
(SMB) protocol, which means that you can use it with Windows and Linux, and you can access it from
the cloud or from on-premises systems. Like the other Azure Storage types, File Storage is scalable
and inexpensive.

Try it out Get started with Azure File Storage.

Disk Storage
Azure Disk Storage is similar to File Storage, but is specifically meant for high I/O performance.
It is perfect for use as a drive in a VM that needs high performance, like a VM that runs SQL Server.
Note, though, that Disk Storage is available only in the premium pricing tier of Azure Storage.

Azure Data Lake Store


The previous data stores were meant for regular application use or for use with VMs. Azure Data Lake
Store is as storage for big data applications. You use it to store large amounts of data in its native
format – structured, unstructured or anything in between. The point of the Data Lake Store is to
hold your raw data so that you can analyse it or transform and move it. Following are the main
characteristics of Azure Data Lake:

 Unlimited storage capacity. A single file can be larger than one petabyte in size – 200 times larger
than other cloud providers offer.

 Scalable performance to accommodate massively parallel analytics.

 You can store data in any format, without a schema.

This is a very different approach from the traditional data warehouse, in which you define data
schemas upfront.

For instance, you could use a Data Lake Store to store all of the data that you get from your Internet
of Things (IoT) devices that are collecting temperature data. You can leave the data in the store and
then filter through it and create a view of the data per hour, or per week. Storing the data in Data Lake
Store is quite inexpensive, so you can keep years of data there at a very low cost.

Try it out Get started with Azure Data Lake Store using the Azure portal.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse


You use Azure SQL Data Warehouse when you need a traditional data warehousing solution that is
completely managed, scalable in size and performant and secure. You store data in predefined
schemas and query it by using the familiar SQL Server SQL dialect.

Because SQL Data Warehouses run in Azure, you can use advanced features like automatic threat
detection, which uses machine learning to understand the patterns of your workload and serve as
an alarm system to alert you of a potential breach.

An example of using SQL Data Warehouse is when you know which reports you want to show to
users and know what the data schema for these reports is. You can then create schemas in SQL Data
Warehouse and populate them with data so that users can navigate through the data.

Try it out Create an Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

23 CH A P TER 2 | Getting started with Azure


3

Hosting your application and data and having it scalable, secure and
performing well is nice, but wouldn’t it be great if you could add
intelligent features to it?

Azure Search
Search is a common feature in most applications and yet it has traditionally been a difficult function to
implement. Azure Search provides a lot of the “plumbing” to do search. You spin up an Azure Search
instance, create an index that helps you search and fill it with data – that’s it. There are lots of options
that you can use to tweak Azure Search and there are lots of great features that will make searching
easier for your users:

 Geo-search that gives users the ability to explore data based on how close a search result is
to a physical location.

 Language analysers from Lucene as well as Microsoft‘s natural language processors (NLPs),
available in 56 languages to intelligently handle language-specific linguistics, including
verb tenses, gender, irregular plural nouns (for example, “mouse” versus “mice”), word
de-compounding, word-breaking (for languages with no spaces) and more.

 Monitoring and reporting that tell you what was searched for and how fast and successful
the search was.

 User experience features like sorting and paging search results and intelligent filtering,
and providing search suggestions.

24 CH A P TER 3 | Adding intelligence to your application


You could implement Azure Search to help users search your product catalogue in an e-commerce
application.

Try it out Create your first Azure Search index in the portal.

Azure Cognitive Services


With Azure Cognitive Services, you can add incredible intelligence to your applications. Cognitive
Services is a collection of APIs that you can use to accomplish what at times appears to be magic.
There are more than 25 APIs in the categories of Vision, Speech, Language, Knowledge and Search.
Here’s a glimpse of the APIs that you can use:

 Using the Face API, you can perform facial recognition and identification and can even determine
the colour of a person’s eyes, even if that person is wearing glasses.

 The Emotion API determine which emotions an individual is showing in a picture.

 The Language Understanding Intelligent Services API (or LUIS) can actually understand text,
based on the model you use to train it.

 The Translator Speech API turns speech into text and translates it for you in real time

The Cognitive Services get their smarts through machine learning and artificial intelligence, which you
can train with your own datasets. These services are simply amazing and open up possibilities that we
couldn’t even dream of a mere few years ago.

Azure Bot Service


The Azure Bot Service makes it easy for you to create a bot – a piece of software that can
automatically and autonomously interact with users.

Creating a bot is no trivial task. You need to keep track of the context of your interaction with the user
and you must be ready to respond to a multitude of possible interaction parameters. Bot Service helps
you with this in the following ways:

 It helps you to keep track of the interaction context and provides you with templates to get
started from the Bot Framework.

 It has tight integrations with Cognitive Services, making it easier to make your bot “smart.”

 It helps you to integrate with services like Facebook, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Telegram and so on.

 It offers all the benefits of a managed service in Azure: massive scale, built-in Continuous Delivery
(CD) and you pay only for what you use.

An example of a bot that you can build with Bot Service is one that provides your users with answers
to their most frequently asked questions. The interface of the bot can be a chat box that is on your
website.

Try it out Getting Started Chatbot using Azure Bot Service.

25 CH A P TER 3 | Adding intelligence to your application


Using events and messages in your application
Modern, globally distributed applications often must deal with large amounts of messages coming in
and need to be designed with decoupling and scaling in mind. Azure provides several services to help
with event ingestion and analysis and messaging patterns.

Azure Service Bus


The core of messaging in Azure is the Azure Service Bus. The Service Bus service encompasses
a collection for services that you can use for messaging patterns, most important among them
Azure Services Bus Queues and Topics.

Try it out Gets started with Azure Service Bus Queues and Topics.

Azure Service Bus Queues


You use Azure Service Bus Queues to decouple systems from one another. Here’s an example:
A web application receives orders from users and needs to invoke a web service to process the
order. The web service will take a long time, maybe up to five minutes, to process the order
completely. Of course, it’s unacceptable for the web application to wait five minutes between
the user placing an order and showing feedback. A good way to solve this is to use a queue to
decouple the web application from the web service.
The web application receives the order and writes it in a message on an Azure Service Bus Queue.
After it has done that, it can inform the user that the order is being processed. The web service
takes messages from the queue, one by one, and processes them. When the web service has
finished processing an order, it sends an email notification to the user, informing them that the
item has been ordered.
By decoupling the systems, the web application can work at a different speed from the web service,
and both can be scaled individually to the applications’ needs.
Service Bus Queue is a simple mechanism. Multiple applications can put messages in the queue,
but a queue message can be processed by only one application at a time. It has some clever
features to work with messages in the queue, like duplicate detection and a dead-letter subqueue
to which messages are moved when they fail to be processed correctly.

Azure Service Bus Topics


Just like Service Bus Queues, Azure Service Bus Topics are a form of application decoupling. Here’s the
differences between the queue and topics:

 With a queue, multiple applications write messages to the queue, but only one application at
a time can process a message.

 With a topic, multiple applications write messages to the topic and multiple applications can
process a message at the same time.

Service Bus Topics work just like a queue and multiple applications can process the same message.
Applications can create a subscription to the topic that indicates what type of messages they are
interested in. Just like queues, topics have features like duplicate detection and a dead-letter
subqueue to which messages are moved when they fail to be processed correctly.

26 CH A P TER 3 | Adding intelligence to your application


Comparing Service Bus Queues and Azure Storage Queues
There are Service Bus Queues, but there are also Azure Storage Queues. They basically do the same
thing, but there are subtle differences between them. Table 3-1 looks at each of them.
Table 3-1: A comparison of features between Service Bus Queues and Storage Queues

Azure Service Bus Queues Azure Storage Queues


Message lifetime >7 days Message lifetime <7 days
Guaranteed (first in–first out) ordered Queue size >80 GB
Duplicate detection Transaction logs
Message size ≤1 MB Message size ≤64 KB

Azure Event Hubs


In our world of ubiquitous software, data is being generated from many applications, devices
and locations, all the time. Today, it’s becoming more common for enterprises to capture massive
amounts of that data to analyse it or transform and move it for later use. Azure Event Hubs can help.

Event Hubs is designed for massive data ingestion. You can throw millions of messages per second at
it and it will handle that data for you effortlessly. It can retain messages for up to seven days or retain
them indefinitely by writing them to a data store using the Event Hubs Capture feature.

You can use Event Hubs to filter the data with queries, as it comes in and output it to a data store like
Azure Cosmos DB. You can even replay messages if you need to.

Try it out Get started sending messages to Azure Event Hubs in .NET Standard.

Azure IoT Hub


Just like Event Hubs, Azure IoT Hub is built for massive data ingestion. It is specifically geared towards
handling the enormous volume of data messages from devices on the Internet of Things (IoT; refer to
the sidebar in Chapter 1, “Who uses Azure?” for an example), like smart thermostats or sensors in cars.
It has many of the same properties as Event Hubs, like the ability to retain messages for up to seven
days and replay them.

What makes IoT Hub unique is that in addition to receiving messages from devices, it can send
messages to them as well. It has the ability to manage your complete IoT infrastructure. You can use
IoT Hub to register devices and report their state, manage them by securing them and restarting them
and sending data to devices.

Try it out Connect your device to your IoT hub using .NET.

Azure Event Grid


Azure Event Grid, offers a different type of messaging. Event Grid offers a fully managed,
publish/subscribe service that hooks into almost every service in Azure and can hook into custom
publishers and subscribers.

This is different from working with the Service Bus Queues and Topics, for which you’d need to poll
the Queue or Topics for new messages. Event Grid automatically pushes messages to subscribers,
making it a real-time, reactive event service.

27 CH A P TER 3 | Adding intelligence to your application


Services in and outside of Azure publish events (for example, when a new Blob is added or when a new
user is added to an Azure subscription). Azure Event Grid can detect these events and make them
available to event handlers and services that subscribed to the events (Figure 3-1). Event handlers
can be things like Azure Functions or Azure Logics Apps, which can then act on the data in the event.

Figure 3-1: Azure Event Grid overview

Another important aspect of Event Grid is that it is serverless. This means that like Azure Logic
Apps and Azure Functions, Event Grid scales automatically and doesn’t need an instance of it being
deployed. You just configure and use it. And, you pay only when it is used, not for it just being there.

Here’s a usage example for the Azure Event Grid:

You want to be notified by email every time a user is added to or deleted from your mailing list in
MailChimp.

Azure Event Grid is used to activate an app in Azure Logic Apps and is configured to listen to changes
to the MailChimp mailing list. The next step is to send an email containing the name of the user that
has been added or deleted and the action that was performed (add or delete). Now, when a new user
is added to the mailing list, Event Grid signals the Logic App, which sends an email.

Try it out Monitor virtual machine changes with Azure Event Grid and Logic App.

What to use when?


Azure provides myriad options for messaging and decoupling applications. Which one should you
use, and when? Table 3-2 sums up the differences to help you sort it out.
Table 3-2: When to use which Azure service for messages or events

Event Event Service Bus Storage


Grid Hubs IoT Hub Topics Queues Queues
Event ingestion X X X
Device management X
Messaging X X X X X X
Multiple consumers X X X X
Multiple senders X X X X X X
Use for decoupling X X X X X
Use for publish/subscribe X
Max. message size 64 KB 256 KB 256 KB 1 MB 1 MB 64 KB

28 CH A P TER 3 | Adding intelligence to your application


4

Security today is one of the most important aspects of any application and
it is no simple thing to get right. Fortunately, Azure provides many services
to help you secure your application. We take a look at some of them in this
chapter.

Azure Active Directory


An important part of your application’s security is authenticating users before they can use it.
Authentication is not an easy thing to implement. You need to store user identities and credentials
somewhere, implement password management, create a secure authentication handshake and so on.

Azure Active Directory provides all of these things and more out of the box. You store your user
identities in Azure Active Directory and have users authenticate against it, redirecting them to your
application only after they are authenticated. Azure Active Directory takes care of password
management, including common scenarios like “I forgot my password.”

Azure Active Directory is used by millions of applications every day, including the Azure portal,
Outlook.com and Office 365. Because of this, it is able to more readily detect malicious behaviour and
act on it. For instance, if a user were to sign in to an application from a location in Europe and then
one minute later sign in from Australia, Azure Active Directory would flag this as malicious behaviour
and ask the user for additional credentials through multifactor authentication.

Azure API Management


APIs should be secure. This is true for APIs that you create yourself as well as those that you consume
from third-party vendors. To assist in making your APIs secure, you can use Azure API Management.
This is basically a proxy that you put in front of your APIs or those from third-party vendors that adds
features like caching, throttling and authentication/authorisation.

29 CH A P TER 4 | Securing your application


You can secure your API with API Management by requiring consumers to create a subscription to
your API. This way, calling applications need to authenticate before they can use your API. You can use
various authentication methods like access tokens, basic authentication and certificates. Additionally,
you can track who is calling your API and block unwanted callers.

Try it out Get started with Azure API Management.

Azure Key Vault


As part of your security architecture, you need a secure place to store certificates, keys and other
secrets. Azure Key Vault provides that. With Key Vault, you have one central location where you store
the secrets that your applications use.

These can be the credentials in a connectionstring that your application uses. Your application
would get the connectionstring from Key Vault instead of from the configuration system. This way,
administrators can control the secrets and developers never need to deal with them.

You also use Key Vault to store certificates like Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates that you use to
secure the traffic to and from your applications over HTTPS.

Try it out Get started with Azure Key Vault.

Azure DDoS protection


You’ve heard it too many times on the news and you certainly don’t want it to happen to your
enterprise: your application is attacked by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. These types
of attacks are becoming more common and can overwhelm your application to the point that nobody
can use it anymore.

Azure protects you from DDoS attacks with its Azure DDoS protection layer. This is a layer in the Azure
physical network that is not accessible to customers. This is part of the Azure platform and you get it
for free with all your services. You don’t need to do anything or configure anything to use it. It is
always there to protect you.

More information Read more about Azure DDoS protection.

Azure Web Application Firewall


You need to secure your application against many possible threats, including those defined in the
Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) specification, such as SQL injection and Cross-Site
Scripting (XSS). Azure Web Application Firewall can lend a hand with that. Web Application Firewall,
a feature of the Azure Application Gateway service, provides real-time protection of your application.

It can detect a malicious attack, as defined in the OWASP core rule set and block that attack from
reaching your application. It also reports on attempted or ongoing attacks, so that you can see which
threats are trying to get to your application. This provides an extra layer of security that protects your
applications.

30 CH A P TER 4 | Securing your application


Default encryption of data
You protect your data stores as well as you can by having secure connectionstrings and firewall
rules in place. But if an attacker somehow is able to gain access to your data, you want to render it
useless via encryption.

By default, your data is encrypted when you store it in Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Data
Warehouse, Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Storage, Azure
Cosmos DB or Azure Data Lake Store. And this all works automatically; you don’t need to do a thing
to configure it or to encrypt or decrypt data when you use it.

31 CH A P TER 4 | Securing your application


5

The Azure services that you choose to work with determine your
deployment options and vice versa. Therefore, it is important to
understand the deployment options that you have in Azure and
what their ramifications are.

The DevOps mind-set


Delivering fast and reiterating fast is crucial to creating great software. Therefore, your new code
should be merged with your team’s code, and that should be deployed and tested as fast and as
often as possible to see if everything works and ensure that what you’ve built is what the user needs.

Many of the Azure services that we’ve looked at so far in this book are able to have code
automatically delivered to them, often through a Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline that you
set up within the service.

Besides the native capabilities of Azure services, you can use Visual Studio Team Services to build,
test and deploy your application. You can easily create new build and deployment pipelines in Visual
Studio Team Services as well as do things like automate load-testing and swap deployment slots into
production.

Try it out Get started with Visual Studio Team Services.

32 CH A P TER 5 | Where and how to deploy your Azure services


Azure Resource Manager Templates
All of the Azure services introduced in this guide are based on Azure Resource Manager. We can use
this to script our environment into Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), using Resource Manager templates.
These templates are JSON files that describe what you want to deploy and what its parameters are.

You can create Resource Manager templates in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code using the Azure
Resource Group project template. You can also generate Resource Manager templates from the Azure
portal by clicking the Automation Script button, which is available on the menu bar of every resource
in the Azure portal. This generates the Resource Manager template for the given resource and even
generates code for creating the resource using the Azure command-line interface (CLI), Windows
PowerShell, .NET and Ruby.

After you have a Resource Manager Template, you can deploy it to Azure by using Windows
PowerShell, the Azure CLI or Visual Studio. Or, you can automate its deployment in a CD pipeline
using Visual Studio Team Services.

You use Resource Manager templates to deploy applications to run on the Azure platform, either in
the public cloud or on-premises, on Azure Stack.

A great example of deploying resources to the cloud using Resource Manager is the Deploy To Azure
button that you can find in many GitHub repositories, as illustrated in Figure 5-1.

Figure 5-1: One-button deployment of an Azure Logic App using an Resource Manager template in GitHub

Azure Service Fabric


Another way to run your applications is to run them on Azure Service Fabric. Service Fabric is the
foundation that Microsoft uses to run many Azure resources and to make them highly available,
well-performing and self-healing. You can now use Service Fabric yourself, to host your own services.

You can use the Azure Service Fabric SDK to create applications for Service Fabric. You can also run
any executable in Service Fabric and you can even use it to host containers.

Service Fabric is amazing at making your applications just as well-performing, reliable and secure
as many Azure services, and you can use it anywhere: you can deploy Service Fabric in Azure,
on-premises, on your own computer and even on Virtual Machines (VMs) in other clouds.

After you have deployed your application in Azure Service Fabric, it provides you with benefits such
as these:

 Load balancing
 Automatic scaling

 High availability

 Self-healing

33 CH A P TER 5 | Where and how to deploy your Azure services


 Replication and failover

 Rolling upgrades
 Automatic rollback

Containers in Azure
Containers is one of those technology buzzwords that flies around the news. But, they are more than
just buzz – they are actually very useful for running your applications. A container is basically a light-
weight VM that starts and stops much faster than a VM and is therefore much more useful for
development, testing and running applications in production.

The major benefit that you derive from containers is that an individual container is always the same.
You run a container locally when you develop your app and you use the same container configuration
in the cloud or anywhere else. Your entire team uses the exact same container configuration, so you
know that the infrastructure is the same for everybody and in production. With containers, the age-
old developer’s fallback statement, “works on my machine,” now means that it will also work in
production.

There are many technologies for running containers and Docker is one of them. Azure can run and
manage containers for you with Azure Container Instances and Azure Container Service, and even
in Services Fabric and Azure App Service running on Linux.
Table 5-1 shows which service you can use for a given scenario when using containers.
Table 5-1: Choosing which Azure service to use for containers

Azure Container Azure Container Azure Service


Services Instances Fabric
For production deployments of complex
X
systems (with a container orchestrator)
For running simple configurations (possibly
X
without orchestrator)
For long-running workloads on containers X
For short-running workloads on containers X
For orchestrating a system based on
X X
containers
Orchestrating with open-source
orchestrators (DC/OS, Docker Swarm, X
Kubernetes)
Orchestrating with built-in orchestrator X

Note Keep in mind that when you use containers, you are using an infrastructure as
a service (IaaS) product and that you are responsible for the operating system (OS),
patching, load balancing and so on.

Azure Stack
If you need your applications and data to remain on-premises, but you still want to benefit from the
power that Azure has to offer, Azure Stack is the product for you. Unique in the industry, Azure Stack
is an extension of Azure that you host in your own environment. Essentially, it is Azure-in-a-box.

34 CH A P TER 5 | Where and how to deploy your Azure services


You use Azure Stack in the same way as you do Azure, with the same Azure portal experience and
the same APIs with which you can use the Azure CLI, Windows PowerShell or your favourite IDE.

You can run things like Azure App Service and Azure Virtual Machines on Azure Stack. Everything is
exactly the same as in the public cloud, only now you are running it on-premises. And if you decide
to move to the public cloud, you simply push services from Azure Stack to Azure.

Where to deploy, when?


Table 5-2 summarises the deployment options for Azure. Note that using all of the platform as
a service (PaaS) services that we have discussed in this guide is possible only when using the
Public Cloud with Resource Manager templates or on-premises with Azure Stack.
Table 5-2: Comparing Azure deployment options

IaaS PaaS
On-premises Azure Stack Azure Stack
Containers Service Fabric
Service Fabric
Public cloud Containers Service Fabric
Service Fabric Resource Manager templates

35 CH A P TER 5 | Where and how to deploy your Azure services


6

Now that you’ve know what Azure is and have learned about the services
that is has to offer, let’s begin using it.

Walk-through #1: the Azure portal


One of the most important Azure tools is the Azure portal, which you can find at
https://portal.azure.com/. This is your central Azure hub where you do everything with Azure
that you want. Most of the things that you can do in the Azure portal you can do through the
Azure API, the Azure command-line interface (CLI) and Azure PowerShell, as well.

You can use a preview of the Azure portal by visiting https://preview.portal.azure.com. The preview
already contains features that aren’t generally available yet that you can try out and provide feedback
on. The rest of this guide will focus on the generally available version of the portal, not the preview.

The first thing you’ll see in the Azure portal is a dashboard with tiles. You can create and customise
dashboards and share them with team members or keep them just for yourself.

Tiles in the Azure portal


Dashboards contain tiles that display information for a service or act as a shortcut to a service. You
can find these tiles, shown in Figure 6-1, all over the portal, in the pages of all the services. They can
be very useful to get a quick overview of how a service is doing.

Figure 6-1: Informational tiles in the Azure portal

36 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


For instance, The Application Insights service, by default, shows tiles that inform you if there are any
alerts active, if there is any live data coming in, how many users have been active in the past 24 hours,
what the availability has been and so on. This is very useful information in a very consumable format.
You can customise the size and information of tiles. You can also customise the appearance of charts
by adjusting their timelines and having them show data in different formats such as lines or bars.

You can also pin tiles (Figure 6-2) directly to your dashboards so that they are the first thing that you
see when you enter the portal. You can, for instance, pin tiles from all the service metrics that you care
about, to create a monitoring dashboard that you share with your team or display on a monitor in the
team room.

Figure 6-2: You can pin tiles to a dashboard

Finding services
Azure services are the central subject of the Azure portal. You can add and find them in several ways.

To create new services, in the upper-left corner of the portal window, click the plus sign (“+”).
This opens the search box for the marketplace, where you’ll find everything from Web App to
Linux Servers, as depicted in Figure 6-3.

Figure 6-3: The New Resource button in the Azure Portal

When you’ve found the service that you want (Figure 6-4), a wizard takes you through configuring and
deploying it.

Figure 6-4: Resource search results

When you have some resources, you can find them through search. You can use the search box at the
top of the portal (Figure 6-5) to search through all of your resources and take you directly to them.

37 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


Figure 6-5: The favourites menu in the Azure portal

In the pane on the left side of the portal is the favourites menu. This menu displays the resource
categories (represented by their icons) such as Azure App Service. You can rearrange the icons by
dragging them up and down. You also can select which ones you want to see by expanding the
favourites menu and clicking the stars of those categories.

Understanding Blades
Pages in Azure are also called blades. Blades are everywhere and you can even pin them to your
dashboards. When you open a web app, you first see the overview blade. This particular blade
provides you with tools to stop, start and restart the web app and displays tiles showing its metrics,
such as number of requests and errors. When you choose another menu item, a new blade opens.
Blades always open in context. So, if you open the Deployment Slots blade and click the Create New
Deployment Slot button, a new blade shows up to the right of the Deployment Slots blade, preserving
the context you are in.

Creating a new virtual machine


Let’s use the Azure portal to create a new virtual machine (VM) that runs Red Hat Linux. After creating
it, we will show you how to shut it down and remove it so that you are not paying for it anymore.

A word about resource groups


The VM will be deployed in a resource group. All Azure resources reside inside resource groups.
A resource group is a logical container that holds your resources. You can manage the security of
a resource group and you can see what the resources in the group cost. It is a common practice
to bundle related services together in a resource group so that they are easy to secure and you
can easily find out what they cost.

1. In the Azure portal, in the upper-left corner, click the Create A New Service button.
2. In the Search box, type Linux virtual machine.

You’ll get many search results, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Let’s try out its latest version.

3. Click the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

38 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


4. Click Create.

The Create Virtual Machine Wizard opens.


a. Choose a name for the VM.

b. Choose the drive type. SSD provides a faster VM, but is also more expensive. For this
walk-through, choose SSD.

c. Type a username.
d. Select Password for the Authentication type.

e. Type a password and confirm.

f. In the Resource Group box, type a new name.

g. Pick the location of the VM and then click OK.

5. Choose the size of the VM.

The performance of the VM determines how much you pay for it. There are many sizing options
for VMs, some small, some incredibly large. You can use the wizard to select how many cores
and how much memory you want and choose options based on that. Besides that, there are other
features that come with size options:
a. Type of hard drive (SSD or normal HDD).

b. The amount of max IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second). This determines the
performance of the VM in a significant way, especially if the applications that you run
read and write a lot from and to the hard drive.

c. The amount of data drives that can be installed in the VM.

d. The ability to do load balancing.

e. The graphics card that is installed in the VM. This is useful if you need to do a lot of
graphics rendering or heavy computational workloads.

6. After you’ve selected the size, you can configure additional settings such as the Virtual Network
and IP address and installing extensions on the machine. For now, leave everything as is and
click OK.
7. Review the summary, agree to the terms and then click Purchase.

The VM will now be deployed. This usually takes just a few minutes.

Connect to the VM by using Secure Shell


Now that you’ve created a VM with Red Hat Linux on it, you can connect to it and begin using it.
You can use various tools like Secure Shell (SSH) or even remote desktop into the VM. We are going
to use SSH to connect to the VM using the Cloud Shell in the Azure portal.

Cloud Shell is the Azure CLI in the browser – there is no longer a need for you to install anything on
your PC. Cloud Shell uses the Azure CLI version 2.0. You can use Bash or PowerShell in the Cloud Shell
to interact with your Azure resources.

39 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


To start the Cloud Shell, in the upper-right of the Azure portal, click the button shown here:

To connect to the VM, you need its IP address. Find the VM in the Azure portal (either by searching
for it or navigating to it). In the Overview blade of the VM, in the upper-left corner, click the connect
button (see Figure 6-6). When you click it, the blade displays the IP address that can be used to
connect with the VM, as shown in Figure 6-6. Copy the IP address.

Figure 6-6: Connect to a VM in the Azure portal

Now, you can use this command directly in the Cloud Shell: just paste it and press Enter. You will
see a warning that there is no authentication key. This is because we chose to work with a password,
instead. Choose Yes, type your password and you are in! Now you are connected to Red Hat Linux
enterprise and you can begin using it. Figure 6-7 shows that we are logged in to the Virtual Machine
through Cloud Shell and traversing the file system:

Figure 6-7: Traversing the Linux file system using the Cloud Shell in the Azure portal

40 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


Add additional storage to the VM
If you are using your VM as a database server, you often want to have extra storage space to handle
database data. You can create extra storage space by adding an additional drive through the Azure
portal.

1. Go to the VM, select the Disks tab and then click Add Data Disk, as shown in Figure 6-8.

Figure 6-8: The Disk tab of a VM in the Azure portal

Because we have no existing disks to attach, select Create Disk.

2. The Create Managed Disk Wizard opens. Use this wizard to create a managed drive (instead of an
unmanaged drive).

Managed disks are completely managed by Azure; you don’t need to create and maintain an
underlying storage account for them. Optionally, you can choose the size of the drive and what
should be on it, but we are going to leave everything as is. Type a name and then click Create.
You now have an additional drive attached to your VM.

You can also create and attach a new drive via the Cloud Shell or Azure CLI by using this
command:
az vm disk attach -g myResourceGroup --vm-name myVM --disk myDataDisk --new --size-gb 50

If you need help with the Azure CLI, you can type az -h. All Azure CLI commands follow the same
structure: az noun(s) (e.g. vm) verb (e.g. attach) options.

After you’ve created a new drive for your VM, you need to initialise it in Linux. This document guides
you through the process.

Creating additional drives for extra VM storage is simple. The steps after that can be more
complicated, depending on the OS that you use.

Clean up the walk-through resources


If you're finished with the VM, you can shut it down and delete the resource group that we created at
the outset of creating the VM. This contains the VM and all the other resources that are automatically
created. After the resource group is deleted, you no longer pay for any of the resources that you've
used in this walk-through.

41 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


Walk-through #2: developing a Node.js web app
with MongoDB on Azure
In this walk-through, we deploy a simple Node.js application that connects with MongoDB and host
that in Azure. We will host the application in Azure Web App and use Azure Cosmos DB as our
database, because that has a MongoDB interface.

To follow along you’ll need to have the Azure CLI (v2.0 or higher), Git (v2 or higher), Node.js and NPM
(v6 or higher) and MongoDB (3.4 or higher) installed on your computer.
We’ll use a sample application that uses the MEAN.js web framework.

Creating the web app and database using the Azure portal
To host the Node.js application, we’ll create a new web app in Azure Web App.

1. In the Azure portal, click the Create A New Service button.

2. Search for Web App. The Web App blade opens. Click Create to get started.
3. The Web App Create blade opens.

a. Type a name for the Web App.

b. Create a new resource group by giving it a name.


c. Select the OS to run on (Windows or Linux).

d. Select or create an App Service Plan and then click Create.

Web App runs on App Service Plans


App Services, like Web App, run on Azure App Service Plans. App Service Plans are abstractions of
resources and features, like CPU and memory, and are represented in pricing tiers. App Service
Plans are also bound to a specific geographical region that you choose. You can, for instance,
run your Web App application in an App Service Plan of pricing tier S1 (see Figure 6-9), which has
1 core and 1.75 GB RAM.

Figure 6-9: Azure App Service Plan explained

You can run as many App Services on an App Service Plan as you want, as long as you realise that
you need to share the resources amongst all of the App Services.

42 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


To host the database, we’ll create a Cosmos DB database that uses the MongoDB API. This will work
exactly the same as MongoDB would and it has all of the benefits that Cosmos DB offers.

1. In the Azure portal, click the Create A New Service button.


2. Search for Cosmos DB. The Cosmos DB blade opens. Click Create to begin.

a. Type a name (ID) for the database account.

b. Choose the MongoDB API.


c. Select the resource group that you created for the web app.

d. Choose the location. Preferably, a location that is the same as or close to where the
web app is.

e. Click Create.

Run the Node.js application and MongoDB database locally


Let’s run the app locally before we run it in Azure.

If you haven’t done so already, install MongoDB Community edition:

1. Open a command prompt on your computer and navigate to the bin directory of your MongoDB
installation. This could be something like C:\Program Files\MongoDB\Server\3.4\bin.
2. Type mongo to connect to the local MongoDB server.

3. If it fails, make sure that your MongoDB database is started. Often, you need to start it by running
mongod.

Now to clone the Node.js starter application and run it:

4. In the command window, navigate to a directory to which you want the application source to be
downloaded.

5. Run git clone https://github.com/Azure-Samples/meanjs.git to clone the application.

6. Start the application by running the following commands:


cd meanjs
npm install
npm start

7. When it is fully loaded, you’ll see a message that contains the application URL. Open a browser
and navigate to the server address (something like http://localhost:3000). This should look similar
to Figure 6-10.

Figure 6-10: Mean.JS boilerplate application

43 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


8. On the menu bar, click Sign Up and then try to create a new user. If it works, the app has access
to the local MongoDB database which it uses to write users.

Deploy the Node.js application to Azure


You now have a working application running locally. Let’s deploy it to Azure. We’ll begin by deploying
the Node.js application to the web app in Web App that we created earlier.

We are going to use the Azure CLI to push the application from Git to Azure. Make sure that you
have the Azure CLI 2.0 or newer installed on your computer. When that is done, you need to run the
following az login command to log in to your azure subscription. This opens a website where you
can authenticate and authorise the usage of your Azure subscription by the CLI.

For FTP and local Git, you must have a deployment user configured on the server to authenticate your
deployment. This deployment user is account-level and is different from your Azure subscription
account. You need to configure this deployment user only once. In the Azure CLI, run the following
command, where username and password are values that you make up and fill in (do not include
the < or > character):
az webapp deployment user set --user-name <username> --password <password>

Next, we associate the local Git repository with the web app by running the following:
az webapp deployment source config-local-git --name <app_name> --resource-group
<resource_group_name>

This will return a URL in the form of:


https://<username>@<app_name>.scm.azurewebsites.net:443/<app_name>.git

We will now use this URL to push the application to Azure. First, we add an Azure remote to the local
Git repository. cd to the meanjs directory of the application source code. Now run:
git remote add azure <url_for_deployment>

To deploy the app, run git push azure master. This prompts you for the credentials that you
created earlier. The deployment can take a while. It will notify you when it’s done.

After it’s done, you can browse to the application using http://<app_name>.azurewebsites.net.

Now, the application is deployed to the web app and we have a Cosmos DB database running with
the MongoDB API, but the two aren’t connected yet. Let’s do that next.

Connect the application and the database


To connect the application to the database, it needs to know where the database is. We can do that
by setting the environment variable MONGODB_URI in the web app. We can do that using the Azure
CLI by running the following command:
az webapp config appsettings update \
--name <app_name> \
--resource-group myResourceGroup \
--settings
MONGODB_URI="mongodb://<cosmosdb_name>:<primary_master_key>@<cosmosdb_name>.documents.azure.com:102
50/mean?ssl=true"

You can find the Cosmo DB connection string that you need to use for the MONGODB_URI value in the
Azure portal. There, you can find it in the Connection String menu of the Cosmos DB account.

After running the command with the Azure CLI, the Application Settings of the web app will look like
Figure 6-11.

44 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


Figure 6-11: Application Settings of the Azure Web App

Instead of running the Azure CLI command, you could’ve also added the setting using the Azure
portal.

Now, navigate to the web app again using http://<app_name>.azurewebsites.net. Try signing up
a new user. When that succeeds, the application is communicating with the database. Now you have
a Node.js application with an Azure Cosmos DB using the MongoDB API.

Setting up Continuous Delivery with GitHub


So far, we’ve been pushing code from our local Git repository to Azure. This is fine if you work by
yourself, but if you work in a team, you will need another type of source control, like Visual Studio
Team Services or GitHub.

We are going to use GitHub to push our code to and link that to our web app so that changes are
deployed automatically in a Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline.

1. Go to https://github.com/ and create a new repository.

You need to sign in or create a new account to do this.

2. Create a new repository by going to https://github.com/new.

a. Type a name for the repository.

b. Leave the other settings as they are (public repository, don’t create a README)

c. Create the repository. This results in a screen that should look similar to Figure 6-12

Figure 6-12: Repository link in GitHub

3. Use the URL to set a remote destination for the local Git repository. You can do that in the
command window.

a. cd to the meanjs directory of the application source code.

b. Run the following command:


git remote add github https://github.com/bmaluijb/test.git

45 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


c. Run the following command to push the code to GitHub:
git push github

Now, our code is in GitHub and you can share it with your team. Next, let’s set up CD. We’ll use
the Deployment Options feature of Web App through the Azure portal. We could’ve also used the
Continuous Delivery feature in Web App, but that requires a Visual Studio Team Services account
and we want to keep it simple.
1. In the Azure portal, go to the web app that hosts the Node.js application.

2. On the menu bar, click Deployment Options.

3. It’s possible that this is already configured for the local Git Repository. If this is the case, you need
to click Disconnect.

4. In Choose Source, select GitHub.

5. In the Authorisation section, authorise Azure to use GitHub by clicking Authorise and granting
permission.

6. In the Choose Project section, choose the GitHub repository that you just created.
7. Leave the Branch set to master

8. Click OK and wait for a few seconds.

Go back to the Deployment Options menu. You can now see that it is connected. From this point,
whenever you push a new version of source code to GitHub, it will be built and deployed to the web
app automatically, as demonstrated in Figure 6-13. You can also force this process by clicking the
Sync button.

Figure 6-13: The Deployment Options blade of the Web App

Setting up staging environments


Using Web App, you can set up a staging slot in which to test the new version of your application. You
can use deployment slots for this. Deployment slots are full App Services on their own which you can
use to test your code before you promote it to the next slot.

You can have deployment slots for staging, load-testing and production (which is always the original
App Service, so the Node.js web app in our case). In fact, you can have as many deployment slots as
you want, without incurring any additional costs. The deployment slots all run in the same App Service
Plan and that’s what you pay for. You should keep in mind that having additional deployment slots in
an App Service Plan will consume resources like CPU and memory.

You can create new deployment slots from the Deployment Slots menu item in the web app. Make
sure that you are running the web app in the Standard or Premium pricing tier because the free plan
doesn‘t come with any Deployment Slots.

46 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


In each deployment slot that you create, you can configure the deployment options as we did earlier
to deploy code automatically. You can even work on different source code branches for different
environments and automatically deploy specific branches to specific deployment slots.

Additionally, you can test your final version in a deployment slot and when you're happy, you swap it
with the production slot. This warms-up the application before it swaps, which results in a deployment
with no downtime.
Let’s go through creating a deployment slot and swapping to it.

1. In the Azure portal, go to the web app that hosts the Node.js application.

2. On the menu bar, click Deployment Slots. The deployment slots blade opens.
3. Click the plus sign (+) to create a new deployment slot.

a. Type a name for the slot (e.g. staging).

b. Choose the Node.js web app as the Configuration Source (this copies the application
settings to the new slot).
c. Click OK to create the slot.

4. After the slot is created, it is similar to the original web app.

a. Set up CD for the slot just as you did in the previous procedure for the web app.

b. Disconnect the CD connection in the original Node.js web app. This way, when you push
new code, it’s delivered only into the staging slot

5. Make a change to the Node.js application.

a. Change some text in the home.client.view.html file (you can find it in the
meanjs\modules\core\client\views folder).

b. Commit it to Git and Push it to GitHub, the same as when you deployed the Node.js app.

The new version is now in the staging slot and not in the original web app (which we call the
production slot). You can verify this by navigating to the URL of the Node.js web app and to the URL
of the staging slot (which you can find in the overview blade of the slot, just like in the web app
overview blade).

Let’s put the new version into production.


1. In the Azure portal, go to the Node.js web app.

2. On the menu bar, click Deployment Slots to open the deployment slots blade.

3. Click the swap button to open the Swap blade.


a. Leave all the settings as they are.

b. Click OK to initiate the swap.

After the swap is complete, the new version of the Node.js web app is in production (test it by
navigating to the URL of the Node.js web app). Using deployment slots in this way is very beneficial
because you can test the new version before it goes into production and then deploy it to production
with no downtime.

47 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


Additional diagnostics with diagnostics logs
When the application is running, it is vital to know how it is performing. A great way of monitoring the
app is by using diagnostics logs to see live diagnostic logging from the web app. You can even pipe
them into the console window. To do that, run the following command in the Azure CLI:
az webapp log tail --name <app_name> --resource-group myResourceGroup

You’ll see some logging when you use the application in the web app to generate some traffic.

How to set up sophisticated monitoring and alerts


Another great way to keep track of how your application is doing is by using Application Insights.
This is a monitoring tool in Azure that can keep you informed as to how everything in your application
is doing, from how many visitors used your app to how many exceptions occurred and where in the
code they occurred. Unlike Diagnostic Logs, Application Insights come at a nominal fee.

You can set up Application Insights in the Azure portal from the web app.

1. Go to the Azure portal and then to the web app that hosts the Node.js application.
2. On the menu bar, click Application Insights.

3. Select Create New Resource.

a. Type a name and select a location for the Application Insights instance.

b. Click OK. Now, Application Insights will be deployed and starts to collect data for the
application.

You do need to configure your application to begin sending data to Application Insights. For our
sample Node.js application, you need to do the following:

1. At the command prompt, cd to the meanjs folder of the Node.js application.

2. Run npm install applicationinsights –save.

3. Go to the Azure portal and retrieve the Application Insights instrumentation key.

You’ll find this in the Application Insights instance, under Properties.

4. Open the file server.js of the Node.js web app.

5. Add the following three lines of JavaScript code before the line:
var app = require('./config/lib/app');
const appInsights = require("applicationinsights");
appInsights.setup("<instrumentation_key>");
appInsights.start();

6. Push the changes to GitHub and start the automatic deployment. From the command prompt,
run the following:
git commit -a -m “added Application Insights support”

7. Run git push github and the changes will be pushed to GitHub and automatically deployed to
the web app.

When the deployment is finished, the application will send data to Application Insights.

By default, Application Insights performs smart detection. This is a very clever feature that detects
when things are going wrong and alerts you when they do. It can detect things like a sudden increase
in failed requests and when the application is behaving unusually slowly. You can also create your own

48 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


custom events for all sorts of metrics and conditions in the Alerts menu of Application Insights, as
demonstrated in Figure 6-14.

Figure 6-14: Application Insights Alerts

Now, go to the Azure portal and find the Application Insights resource and click it. When you’re there,
you will see the overview, which shows you basic metrics such as the server response time, the page
view load time and the number of server requests and failed requests. If you see some data there,
Application Insights is working.

Note You can collect additional information to send to Application Insights by


following this guide.

Scaling the web app


When you have many users, you need the web app to scale to be able to accommodate the traffic.
When it’s not busy, you need it to scale back to save costs. You can do that by using the automatic
scaling feature of App Service. Be aware that you need to run the Web App in the Standard or
Premium pricing tier to use this feature.

The web app has a menu item called Scale Out, as shown in Figure 6-15. You can use this to scale out
manually or automatically.

Figure 6-15: Scaling a Web App through the Azure portal

Scaling out means that you add more instances of your application to handle the load. When you
scale out or scale in automatically, you can do that based on metrics, such as percentage of use of
CPU or memory, on a schedule (every day at 5 PM) or a mix of both. This is very easy to set up and
monitor.

Ready for production! Add Secure Sockets Layer


Now that the app is ready for production, you should confirm that it is secure. Besides authentication
and authorisation, serving the web application over HTTPS is one of the most important things you

49 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


can do. This is because without HTTPS, intruders could see the traffic between your resources and use
it to do bad things (like signing in to your application). Additionally, HTTPS is a requirement for
cutting-edge features like services workers.

Serving traffic to your web app over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is possible by importing an SSL
certificate into the web app and binding it to one of your (custom) domain names. You can either
import your own SSL certificate that you or your company bought, or buy a new one through
Azure App Service Certificates, which makes it easy to buy and validate the certificate. After importing
the certificate, you couple it to one of the domain name bindings of your web app. You can do all of
this from the SSL Certificates menu in the web app.

Walk-through #3: create a backend for your mobile


app with Azure
Almost everybody has a mobile device these days. Traffic for most applications is mostly from mobile
devices and that trend continues to grow. Building a mobile app for your company is one thing, but
providing a robust and reliable experience is something else. Azure can help with that by providing
an advanced backend with Azure App Service Mobile App.
Azure Mobile App applications consist of two parts:

 A backend that provides APIs to communicate with a database and do things like authentication,
offline synchronisation and push notifications

 SDKs for all sorts of platforms to easily connect to the backend

You can build the backend for the Mobile App application in Node.js and C#. The client SDK is
available for basically every mobile platform that is in use. For cross-platform, native and hybrid
mobile apps. It is available for Android, Cordova, iOS, Windows, Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.Forms
and Xamarin.IOS.

In this walk-through, we create a new Mobile App backend with C# that we use with an Android app,
which we build with Xamarin.Android.

To follow along, you need to install the Mobile Development with .NET workload using the
Visual Studio 2017 installer. This installs the Xamarin for Android tools and the necessary SDKs.
You can do the same when you are working on a Mac in Visual Studio for Mac.

Create a mobile app through the Azure portal


It’s easy to get started. Let’s create the mobile backend and a starter app for the client through the
Azure portal.

1. In the Azure portal, click Create A New Service and then, in the Search box, type Mobile App
Quickstart.

2. Select the Mobile App Quickstart result and then click Create.
The Mobile App Create Wizard opens.

a. Type a name for your mobile app.

b. Create a new resource group.

50 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


c. Create a new App Service Plan for the Mobile App to run on. You can use the Free Pricing
Tier for this walk-through.

d. Leave the Application Insights setting off.


e. Click Create. That’s it! The mobile app will now be deployed.

After the Mobile App is deployed, you can begin using it. In the Azure portal, in the mobile app,
click the Quickstart menu item and then select Xamarin.Android. The Quickstart Wizard opens.

Step 1: connect to a database


You need to connect a database to store data. Click the information icon to get started. On the Data
Connections tab that just opened, click Create A New Service. In the Add Data Connection Wizard that
opens, do the following:

1. For Type, select SQL Database.

2. Create a new Database with a new Target Server.

3. Leave the Connection String as is.


4. Click OK.

The data connection is created.

Step 2: create a table API


To communicate with the database, you need an API. You can create an API backend hosted in your
mobile app by following these steps:

1. In the Step 2 area, select C# and then click Download. This downloads the backend project that
you are going to deploy to the mobile app.

2. Unzip the file that you just downloaded and then open it with Visual Studio 2017 or Visual Studio
for Mac.

3. In Visual Studio, right-click the project file and then select Publish.

4. Select App Service and then select Existing and click Publish.

5. Find your mobile app and then click OK to begin publishing. That’s it! The mobile backend is up
and running.

Leave Step 3 to Create a new App and click download.


Unzip the file that you just downloaded and open it in Visual Studio 2017 or Visual Studio for Mac.

Run the application by pressing F5. This starts the Android Emulator and deploys the client app. The
client app is a todo application. You can add an item in the textbox and it will be written to the
backend of your mobile app.

Adding authentication to the app


Now that you have a working mobile app with a backend, you should make sure that it is secure. Let’s
add authentication via Azure Active Directory. To complete this process, you first need to register the
mobile app for authentication with Azure Active Directory. (This tutorial shows you how to do that.)

51 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


Secure the application
In the backend APIs, you need to define which ones you want to secure.

1. Go to your mobile app backend project in Visual Studio 2017 or Visual Studio for Mac.

2. Navigate to Controllers > TodoItemController.cs.


3. Add the [Authorize] attribute to the TodoItemController class.

This restricts any unauthenticated use of this controller.

4. Right-click the project file and then publish it to your mobile app.

Add authentication to the mobile app


The backend is secured. Now, you need to make the mobile app aware of this so that it is able to sign
in. We need to require users to authenticate before they can use the app.
1. In Visual Studio, go to the Xamarin Mobile App project.

2. Add the following code to the TodoActivity class:


// Define a authenticated user.
private MobileServiceUser user;
private async Task<bool> Authenticate()
{
var success = false;
try
{
// Sign in with AAD login using a server-managed flow.
user = await client.LoginAsync(this,
MobileServiceAuthenticationProvider. WindowsAzureActiveDirectory);
CreateAndShowDialog(string.Format("you are now logged in - {0}",
user.UserId), "Logged in!");

success = true;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
CreateAndShowDialog(ex, "Authentication failed");
}
return success;
}

[Java.Interop.Export()]
public async void LoginUser(View view)
{
// Load data only after authentication succeeds.
if (await Authenticate())
{
//Hide the button after authentication succeeds.
FindViewById<Button>(Resource.Id.buttonLoginUser).Visibility = ViewStates.Gone;

// Load the data.


OnRefreshItemsSelected();
}
}

This creates a new method to authenticate a user and a method handler for a new Sign In button.
3. In the OnCreate method, delete or comment-out the following line of code:
OnRefreshItemsSelected();
4. In the Activity_To_Do.axml file, add the following LoginUser button definition before the existing
AddItem button:
<Button
android:id="@+id/buttonLoginUser"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:onClick="LoginUser"
android:text="@string/login_button_text" />

52 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


5. Add the following element to the Strings.xml resources file:
<string name="login_button_text">Sign in</string>

6. Run the application.

A Sign In button now appears next to the Add button. You won’t be able to add any items without
signing in because all the actions on the TodoItemController are now secure. When you click Sign
In, you are directed to the Azure Active Directory authentication screen. Here, use the account that
you use to sign in to the Azure portal. This one is added to the Azure Active Directory by default. Sign
in and you’ll see that you are successfully logged in, as depicted in Figure 6-16, and can begin adding
todo items.

Figure 6-16: Just authenticated in the mobile app in the emulator

Adding Offline Sync to the app


In many mobile scenarios, users won’t have consistent internet access. Even without it, though,
users should be able to continue working. To accommodate this, they can use the Offline Sync feature
in Azure Mobile App. Let’s turn it on for our app:

1. In Visual Studio 2017 or Visual Studio for Mac, go to the Xamarin Android client app.

2. In the ToDoActivity class, uncomment the following line:


#define OFFLINE_SYNC_ENABLED

3. That’s it! Run the app to deploy it to the Android emulator.

Now, the app is working exactly the same as before, but with a few changes. It uses a
IMobileServiceSyncTable instead of a IMobileServiceTable object. It also uses the SQLite
NuGet package. This initiates a SQLite database on the Android device that the app uses to save data
when it is not online. When access to the internet is restored, changes from the local SQLite database
are pushed to your mobile app and potential changes that happened on the backend are
synchronised to the app on the Android device. Let’s try that out:
1. Have the app running on the Android emulator.

2. Sign in as you did before.

53 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


3. Add an item.

4. Disconnect from the internet. In the Android emulator, you can do that in the Extended Controls,
by setting the Signal Strength of the Network to None.

5. Add another item and complete an item by checking it. The app continues to work on the local
SQLite database.

You can verify that the items aren’t written to the backend database by connecting to the Azure
SQL Database that we’ve created earlier using a tool like SQL Server Management Studio. You can
find the connectionstring for the Azure SQL Database when you navigate to it in the Azure
portal.

6. Connect the Android device to the internet again. In the Android emulator, go to the extended
controls and then set the Signal Strength to Great.

7. In your mobile app, click the Refresh button. The local changes will now be synced to the Azure
Mobile App.

Check the Azure SQL Database to see the changes that are now synchronised to the backend.

Additional features and moving to production


It’s easy to set up an app using Mobile App and include advanced features like Authentication and
Offline Sync.

Because the mobile app is an Azure App service, it has all the same features that the other App
Services have. This means that mobile app can also scale automatically, that you can have the same
monitoring and alerting and that you can do additional diagnostics with streaming logs and even
incorporate application debugging.

When you move the app to production, you can provide additional security using App Service
Certificates. You can also set up CD, just like we did for the Node.js application. And you can use
deployment slots to deploy with no downtime.

Setting up all of this used to be difficult; now these problems are solved. Let Azure to do the heavy
lifting for you, so that you can focus on building things that matter!

54 CH A P TER 6 | A walk-through of Azure


7

The Azure ecosystem not only helps you to more quickly and effectively
create dynamic applications, but with the Azure Marketplace, you can find
solutions of all sorts to assist your development efforts. And then it can
help you to connect your product to users all over the globe.

How can the Azure Marketplace help me as


a developer?
The Azure Marketplace provides you with ready-to-run setups of all sorts of products, from Windows
Server to Octopus Deploy, to Oracle Databases, to WordPress instances, to Minecraft servers. You just
click a solution, configure it, deploy it and you can begin using it. The Marketplace is full of products
and solutions from Microsoft and Microsoft Partners. There are also a lot of open-source solutions
there.

The advantage of the Marketplace is the ease of use. Solutions are deployed ready-to-run, along with
all of the required bits and pieces. Sometimes, this is a Virtual Machine with software installed, a
Virtual Network configured and an integrated licence installed or a licence that you bring yourself.
Sometimes, this is a service that you acquire, like a subscription to the Bing Maps API for Enterprise.
You can use the Marketplace to easily test-drive new software and for using enterprise-grade
solutions. No matter what you need, you can probably find a solution for it in the Marketplace.

Azure Solutions
You can learn from companies using Azure successfully, through Azure Solutions. These show you
product documentation, case studies and architecture best practices for common Azure use cases
like Digital Marketing, SharePoint on Azure, Line-of-Business applications and Mobile applications.

55 CH A P TER 7 | Using the Azure Marketplace


The most valuable thing of Azure Solutions for developers are the solution architectures. These
provide you with reference architectures for common problems and explain why you should use
certain products in certain scenarios.

Summary and where to go next


In this guide, we’ve introduced the power that Azure can bring to your applications. Using Azure, you
can do incredible things with your applications – facial and speech recognition, manage your devices
on the Internet of Things in the cloud, scale as much as you want and pay for what you use.

You’ve seen that no matter what programming language you use or what platform you write
applications for, Azure can help you, with services for almost every scenario.

We hope that you continue to use this eBook to become better acquainted with the vast range of
Azure services and determine which ones best fit your scenario.

The days of having to write complicated “plumbing” yourself are over; you can now take advantage
of a wealth of prebuilt solutions. Free yourself up to work on the things that matter and let Azure take
care of the solved problems.

Keep learning with an Azure free account


Sign up for an Azure free account and receive:

 A £150 credit to use on any Azure product for 30 days

 Free access to our most popular products for 12 months, including compute, storage,
networking and database

 25+ products that are always free

56 CH A P TER 7 | Using the Azure Marketplace


Michael and Barry are passionate about Azure and would encourage you to reach out to them on
Twitter for questions regarding this book.

Michael Crump works at Microsoft on the Azure platform and is a coder, blogger
and international speaker on various cloud development topics. He’s passionate
about helping developers understand the benefits of the cloud in a no-nonsense
way.

You can reach him on Twitter @mbcrump or by following his blog at


https://www.michaelcrump.net.

Barry Luijbregts is an independent software architect and developer with a passion


for the cloud. He is also a Pluralsight author. He has worked for many companies
over the past 10 years and is keen to share his knowledge with the community.
He has a broad and deep knowledge of the Microsoft stack with a special interest
in web technology and the cloud. Barry is co-operator of a user group focused on
technology and soft-skills called .NET Zuid (South) and currently teaches people
about the benefits of the cloud. He lives in the Netherlands with his beautiful wife
and baby girl and loves to play with their two Siberian huskies.

You can reach Barry on Twitter @AzureBarry and through his website at
https://www.azurebarry.com/.

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