Introduction

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform, providing a wide variety of services you can
use without purchasing and provisioning your own hardware. Azure enables the rapid development of
solutions and provides the resources to accomplish tasks that may not be feasible in an on-premises
environment. Azure's compute, storage, network, and application services allow you to focus on building
great solutions without the need to worry about how the physical infrastructure is assembled.

How does Microsoft Azure work?

Once customers subscribe to Azure, they have access to all the services included in the Azure portal.
Subscribers can use these services to create cloud-based resources, such as virtual machines (VM) and
databases.

In addition to the services that Microsoft offers through the Azure portal, a number of third-
party vendors also make software directly available through Azure. The cost billed for third-party
applications varies widely but may involve paying a subscription fee for the application, plus a usage fee
for the infrastructure used to host the application.

Microsoft provides five different customer support options for Azure:

 Basic

 Developer

 Standard

 Professional Direct

 Premier

These customer support plans vary in terms of scope and price. Basic support is available to all Azure
accounts, but Microsoft charges a fee for the other support offerings. Developer support costs $29 per
month, while Standard support costs $100 per month and Professional Direct support is $1000 per
month. Microsoft does not disclose the pricing for Premier support.

Getting started with Azure: Understand what cloud computing is, learn about Azure Resource Manager
and Role-Based Access Control, visit the management portals, learn about billing, find out how you can
contribute to the Azure documentation and code

Azure App Service and Web Apps: Learn about the Azure App Service, consisting of Web Apps, Logic
Apps, Mobile Apps, API Apps, and Function Apps. We will focus on Web Apps and how they work with
the App Service and App Service plans, covering th

Virtual Machines: Explore the basic features of Azure Virtual Machines, including how to create,

Storage: Read about the basics of Azure Storage, including blobs, tables, queues, and file shares, as well
as some of the options available such as Premium Storage and Cool Storage.
 Virtual Networks: Learn the basics of virtual networks, including how to create one, and why a virtual
network might be necessary. This also covers site-to-site and point-to-site networking, as well as
ExpressRoute.

Explore two relational database options available in Azure: Azure SQL Database and SQL

Azure Active Directory: Explore basic features of Azure AD, including creating a directory, users and
groups, and using the application gallery.

Management Tools: Explore three common tools for working with Azure: Visual Studio 2015 and the
Azure SDK, Azure PowerShell cmdlets, and the Cross-

Additional Azure services: Get an overview about Azure services not covered in the book that may be
fundamental to you now or in the future, such as Azure Service Fabric and Azure Container Service.

rios: Explore five common scenarios for utilizing Azure features: development and test,
hybrid, application and infrastructure modernization, and Azure Mobile Apps, and Machine Learning.

Azure for DR and backup

Some organizations use Azure for data backup and disaster recovery. Organizations can also use Azure
as an alternative to their own data center. Rather than invest in local servers and storage, these
organizations choose to run some, or all, of their business applications in Azure.

To ensure availability, Microsoft has Azure data centers located around the world. As of January 2020,
Microsoft Azure services are available in 55 regions, spread across 140 countries. Unfortunately, not all
services are available in all regions. Therefore, Azure users must ensure that workload and data storage
locations comply with all prevailing compliance requirements or other legislation.

Privacy

Data security concerns and regulatory compliance requirements make privacy a major issue for cloud
subscribers. To address these worries, Microsoft has created the online Trust Center, which provides
detailed information about the company's security, privacy and compliance initiatives. According to the
Trust Center, Microsoft will only use customer data if it is necessary to providing the agreed upon
services and it will never disclose customer data to government agencies unless it is required by law.

Azure pricing and costs

Similar to other public cloud providers, Azure primarily uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model that charges
based on usage. However, if a single application uses multiple Azure services, each service might involve
multiple pricing tiers. In addition, if a user makes a long-term commitment to certain services, such as
compute instances, Microsoft offers a discounted rate.

The new world: Azure Resource Manager

The Azure Resource Manager is the new methodology for deploying resources. What is it? Since it went
into public preview, the Azure Service Management (ASM) deployment model has been used to deploy
services. In the Azure portal, services managed with ASM are referred to as classic. In 2015, Microsoft
introduced the Resource Manager deployment model as a modern, more functional replacement for
ASM. The Resource Manager deployment model is recommended for all new Azure workloads. These
deployment models are often referred to as control planes because they are used to control services,
not just to deploy them. This is different from a data plane, which manages the data used by a service.
Typically, your running Azure infrastructure will contain many resources, but some of the resources will
be related to one another in some way, such as all being the component services required to run a web
application. For example

The Azure portal

An online management portal provides the easiest way to manage the resources you deploy into Azure.
You can use this to create virtual networks, set up Web Apps, create VMs, define storage accounts, and
so on, as listed in the previous section. As noted earlier in this chapter, there are currently two versions
of the portal. The production portal is the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com. Most features have
been moved to the Azure portal, with some exceptions such as Azure AD. The previous portal is called
the classic Azure portal (https://manage.windowsazure.com), and it can still be used to manage Azure
AD and to configure and scale classic resources such as Cloud Services. In most cases, you will be using
the Azure portal, so that’s what we’re going to focus on in this book. All of the resources that use the
Resource

Manager deployment model can only be accessed in the Azure portal. Let’s take a look at the Azure
portal and how you navigate through it. Dashboard and hub The Azure portal is located at
https://portal.azure.com. When you open this the first time, it will look similar to Figure 1-1.

Azure documentation and samples

In this section, we’ll talk about the Azure documentation and samples, including where you can find
them and how you can contribute bug fixes, changes, or even entirely new articles and samples to the
Azure community.

Documentation

The Azure documentation can be found at http://azure.microsoft.com. This is the conceptual

documentation, which explains the services, how they work, how to use them, and so on. The reference
documentation is on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com). For example, the documentation for the REST
APIs is on MSDN, and it shows every command and all of their options. All of the conceptual
documentation at azure.microsoft.com resides on GitHub. You can contribute to the documentation by
adding articles or modifying articles to include information you believe will be helpful to others. To view
the contributor guide and the current documentation, please go to https://github.com/Azure/azure-
content. Samples In addition to the documentation, there are many Azure samples to help you get
started with Azure, also stored in GitHub. For example, Azure Storage has getting-started samples for
.NET

and Java for Blob storage, Table storage, Queue storage, and File storage. You can use these samples to
help you, and you can also contribute to this repository. These samples can be found here:
http://github.com/azure-samples. For the Resource Manager resources, there is a repository of quick
start templates available here: https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstarttemplates. This has templates
for creating many resources such as the Azure Content Delivery Network, Azure Key Vault, virtual
machines, virtual networks, and storage accounts.

Azure App Service and Web Apps

In this chapter, we take a look at the Azure App Service, consisting of Web Apps, Logic Apps, Mobile
Apps, API Apps, and Function Apps. We focus on Web Apps and how they work together with the App
Service. We create a web app and publish it to Azure. We also look at the options for prebuilt web apps
offered by Azure.

App Service and App Service plans

Before we talk about Web Apps, let’s talk about App Service and the App Service plans. What is an App

the Azure portal to see your website, you will look for the app service in which it is running. It
conveniently has the same name as the app it’s hosting.

So what is an App Service plan?

An App Service plan defines the capacity and resources to be shared among one or more app services
that are assigned to that plan. The following are some of the criteria you can define when creating an

Autoscaling options (depends on tier— automatic, manual, or none) When you deploy your app service
for the first time, you specify which App Service plan you want to use. At deployment time, you can
select an App Service plan you have created or create a new App Service plan.

Visual Studio Code : This is a free, open source, cross-platform code editor with debugging capabilities.
Visual Studio : This is Microsoft’s fullfeatured development IDE.

Marketplace

There are many pre-created websites and templates in the Azure Marketplace that you can use. To see
all of the options available, log into the Azure portal and click New > Web + Mobile > See All. This shows
the Marketplace blade filtered for Web and Mobile apps,