When we decide to migrate our local on-premise data center to the cloud we expect some feature that we know it is able to offer us, those are:
- Elasticity
- Risk Reduce
- Ease Deployment
- Rapid setup
- Shared resources
- Global Architecture
- Lower cost
Let talk a bit about the cloud services…
The Cloud services are really a spearhead in the IT industry these days, the majority of the business is seeing the cloud as an option these days because of the flexibility and advantage it offers.
The cloud services can be:
Manage: those are services that we don’t have to make any configuration over then once we deploy then.
Unmanaged: those are services that we have all the responsibility for them, so for that reason, we need to configure all the behavior we want.
The cloud base products are:
Platform As A Service (PAAS): these are managed components that are already prepared to host our application and require any configuration from us.
Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS): these are services unmanaged that allow us to create the infrastructure that will host our apps just as we wanted, for example, VM or Network Interface.
Software As A Service (SAAS): these services are kind of application we used to leverage a specific task, for example, the bing map or azure artificial intelligence services.
Why a Cloud First Strategy?
The Cloud first strategy help us create a plan about how we spect to manage our resources in the cloud in a most visible and controllable way by creating a repeatable and easy maintenance and manage sets of components allowing us with flexibility and better cost management.
What is Azure Resource Manager?
This is the service offered by Microsoft to manage our Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC), if you have used Cloudformation on AWS, this is a similar approach.
Azure Resource Manager ARM from now on, manage the creation of the component through API that is invoked by the Console.
What is ARM about?
Resource Grouping: Deploy, manage and erase resources easily.
Resource Dependencies: we can define dependency in our resource to keep an order of the components to be deployed in the right order.
Repeatable Deployments: ARM helps us redeploy our whole architecture and only changing the new deployment.
Deployment Templates: repeatable templates to deploy repeatedly.
Role Based Access Control: control access on what can be done on the cloud.
Azure Resource Manager Architecture:
In the above image, we can see how the ARM communicate with the cloud via the ARP Restful API.
In order to become a pro in ARM an article is not enough to explain all functionalities of the ARM, here is the official documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/
Let’s Demo time:
In our demo we are going to create an architecture like below:
This is an architecture that creates a service with redundancy in two different datacenters. Using this approach we will have higher availability than when we have only one instance of the service.
Components to use are:
- Traffic Manager: This component work as load balancer among my services.
- SQL Database: This is my SQL server database used to save and retrieve all the required data.
- App Service: This is a PAAS component that is used to host my application.
Here is the configuration in ARM:edgarleonardo/Template.APIThis Project a project that has its own backend and uses a File ARM to creates all needed components in Azure …github.com
In this example, we added the API and the configuration required in ARM to host this project.
To explain the scheme lets start major components in the JSON file:
Parameters: this is where we add any parameter we want to use to feed our template.
Variables: the variables are used to save any temporal value we need to handle the data among different resources.
Resources: this is where all Azure cloud components are created besides there we specified all the configurations required to make our ARM runs as we are expecting.
Below we have the configuration for the App Services on Different locations:
{
“name”: “[concat(parameters(‘BackendFarmNamePrefix’), ‘-’, copyIndex(), ‘-’, uniqueString(resourceGroup().id))]”,
“type”: “Microsoft.Web/serverfarms”,
“location”: “[parameters(‘WebAppLocations’)[copyIndex()]]”,
“copy”: {
“count”: “[length(parameters(‘WebAppLocations’))]”,
“name”: “WebSitesCopy”
},
“apiVersion”: “2015–08–01”,
“sku”: {
“name”: “[parameters(‘BackendFarmSkuName’)]”
},
“dependsOn”: [],
“tags”: {
“displayName”: “[concat(parameters(‘BackendFarmNamePrefix’),’-’,copyIndex(),’-’,uniqueString(resourceGroup().id))]”
},
“properties”: {
“name”: “[concat(parameters(‘BackendFarmNamePrefix’), ‘-’, copyIndex(), ‘-’, uniqueString(resourceGroup().id))]”,
“numberOfWorkers”: 1
}
},
{
“name”: “[concat(parameters(‘BackendFarmNamePrefix’),’-site-’,copyIndex(),’-’,uniqueString(resourceGroup().id))]”,
“type”: “Microsoft.Web/sites”,
“location”: “[parameters(‘webAppLocations’)[copyIndex()]]”,
“apiVersion”: “2015–08–01”,
“copy”: {
“count”: “[length(parameters(‘webAppLocations’))]”,
“name”: “webSiteCopy”
},
“dependsOn”: [
“WebSitesCopy”
],
“tags”: {
“[concat(‘hidden-related:’, resourceId(‘Microsoft.Web/serverfarms’, concat(parameters(‘BackendFarmNamePrefix’),’-’,copyIndex(),’-’,uniqueString(resourceGroup().id))))]”: “Resource”,
“displayName”: “[concat(parameters(‘BackendFarmNamePrefix’),’-site-’,copyIndex(),’-’,uniqueString(resourceGroup().id))]”
},
“properties”: {
“name”: “[concat(parameters(‘BackendFarmNamePrefix’),’-site-’,copyIndex(),’-’,uniqueString(resourceGroup().id))]”,
“serverFarmId”: “[resourceId(‘Microsoft.Web/serverfarms’, concat(parameters(‘BackendFarmNamePrefix’),’-’,copyIndex(),’-’,uniqueString(resourceGroup().id)))]”
}
}Below we have the configuration for the Traffic Manager:
{
“name”: “[concat(parameters(‘BackendFarmNamePrefix’),’-tm-’,uniqueString(resourceGroup().id))]”,
“type”: “Microsoft.Network/trafficManagerProfiles”,
“apiVersion”: “2015–11–01”,
“location”: “global”,
“dependsOn”: [
“webSiteCopy”
],
“properties”: {
“profileStatus”: “Enabled”,
“trafficRoutingMethod”: “Performance”,
“dnsConfig”: {
“relativeName”: “[concat(parameters(‘BackendFarmNamePrefix’),’-tm-’,uniqueString(resourceGroup().id))]”,
“ttl”: 30
},
“monitorConfig”: {
“protocol”: “HTTP”,
“port”: 80,
“path”: “/”
},
“endpoints”: [
{
“name”: “[concat(parameters(‘BackendFarmNamePrefix’),’-endpoint-’,’0')]”,
“type”: “Microsoft.Network/trafficManagerProfiles/azureEndpoints”,
“properties”: {
“targetResourceId”: “[resourceId(‘Microsoft.Web/sites/’,concat(parameters(‘BackendFarmNamePrefix’),’-site-’,’0',’-’,uniqueString(resourceGroup().id)))]”,
“endpointStatus”: “Enabled”
}
},
{
“name”: “[concat(parameters(‘BackendFarmNamePrefix’),’-endpoint-’,’1')]”,
“type”: “Microsoft.Network/trafficManagerProfiles/azureEndpoints”,
“properties”: {
“targetResourceId”: “[resourceId(‘Microsoft.Web/sites/’,concat(parameters(‘BackendFarmNamePrefix’),’-site-’,’1',’-’,uniqueString(resourceGroup().id)))]”,
“endpointStatus”: “Enabled”
}
}
]
}
}Below we have the database configuration:
{
“name”: “[variables(‘backendsystemdatabasetestName’)]”,
“type”: “Microsoft.Sql/servers”,
“location”: “[resourceGroup().location]”,
“apiVersion”: “2014–04–01-preview”,
“dependsOn”: [ ],
“tags”: {
“displayName”: “backendsystemdatabasetest”
},
“properties”: {
“administratorLogin”: “[parameters(‘backendsystemdatabasetestAdminLogin’)]”,
“administratorLoginPassword”: “[parameters(‘backendsystemdatabasetestAdminLoginPassword’)]”
},
“resources”: [
{
“name”: “AllowAllWindowsAzureIps”,
“type”: “firewallrules”,
“location”: “[resourceGroup().location]”,
“apiVersion”: “2014–04–01-preview”,
“dependsOn”: [
“[resourceId(‘Microsoft.Sql/servers’, variables(‘backendsystemdatabasetestName’))]”
],
“properties”: {
“startIpAddress”: “0.0.0.0”,
“endIpAddress”: “0.0.0.0”
}
},
{
“name”: “[parameters(‘BackendSystemDatabaseName’)]”,
“type”: “databases”,
“location”: “[resourceGroup().location]”,
“apiVersion”: “2014–04–01-preview”,
“dependsOn”: [
“[resourceId(‘Microsoft.Sql/servers’, variables(‘backendsystemdatabasetestName’))]”
],
“tags”: {
“displayName”: “BackendSystemDatabase”
},
“properties”: {
“collation”: “[parameters(‘BackendSystemDatabaseCollation’)]”,
“edition”: “[parameters(‘BackendSystemDatabaseEdition’)]”,
“maxSizeBytes”: “1073741824”,
“requestedServiceObjectiveName”: “[parameters(‘BackendSystemDatabaseRequestedServiceObjectiveName’)]”
}
}
]
}Although it can appear overwhelming coding all this, in the end, is really helpful have all infrastructure as code, besides the flexibility, it is really easier to maintain and know in a better way every component and services that we have running in the Cloud.
