Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Structured review of Azure architectures: A guide for web application review

 Invest a lot of effort to create a perfect architecture before construction should be avoided because this is unrealistic in software development. It is recommend investing in a little bit of architecture envisioning early to identify architecture options in high level, but details should emerge over time. Development team should ensure that architecture will be validated through functioning software, and will be reviewed frequently throughout the project to support optimal implementation. Moreover, emergent architecture should influence and correct intentional architecture.

Architecture review should be performed through out the project development. If you have web app work load in Azure or if you are thinking to move it to Azure, its recommend to perform structured architecture review on following key areas:

  • Availability
  • Scalability
  • Resiliency
  • DevOps
  • Security
  • Management Tools



Performing an Azure architecture review is no longer an activity limited to experts. This paper, by Mahesh Kshirsagar of the AzureCAT team, identifies review drivers and explains how to evaluate your current architecture against these drivers to detect and address current risks. Project teams of any size can self-start a review with this resource. Click download button below to get free PDF copy.



Ref: Microsoft Docs.

Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Choosing Compute Services on Azure (AKS, Service Fabric, App Service)

If you are planning to move your services to cloud its important to understand what is the best candidate compute service for you. You don't want to over/under  provision your solution. So what is the best service we should pick, this is on of the question that i am asked often. While there is no single right or wrong answer it depends on what kind of workload and SLAs you have that will dictate what is best compute service for you.

Azure Compute Services offer following key workloads:

  • App Service: A managed service for hosting web apps, mobile app back ends, RESTful APIs, or automated business processes.
  • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS):  A managed Kubernetes service for running containerized applications.
  • Batch : A managed service for running large-scale parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) applications 
  • Container Instances: The fastest and simplest way to run a container in Azure, without having to provision any virtual machines and without having to adopt a higher-level service. 
  • Functions: A managed FaaS service. 
  • Service Fabric: A distributed systems platform that can run in many environments, including Azure or on premises. 
  • Virtual machines: Deploy and manage VMs inside an Azure virtual network.

It is also important to understand following hosting models:
  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) lets you provision individual VMs along with the associated networking and storage components. Then you deploy whatever software and applications you want onto those VMs. This model is the closest to a traditional on-premises environment, except that Microsoft manages the infrastructure. You still manage the individual VMs. 
  • Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provides a managed hosting environment, where you can deploy your application without needing to manage VMs or networking resources. Azure App Service is a PaaS service. 
  • Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) goes even further in removing the need to worry about the hosting environment. In a FaaS model, you simply deploy your code and the service automatically runs it. Azure Functions is a FaaS service


 Following chart show how best to pick candidate compute service for you:


You also need to look at aspects such as scalability, availability, security and how easily you can perform DevOps.

Ref: Microsoft Docs.