Windows Azure and the IT-pro (just another thought)

Windows Azure and the IT-pro (another thought)

Let`s take a (really quick) look at some interesting parts of Windows Azure with the eyes of an IT-pro

If you could answer these questions to yourself, then you know why this is relevant for you and your job-role.

·         Affinity groups

·         Deployment

·         Updates

·         Monitoring

·         Security

·         Backup

·         VM Role/Worker Role/Web Role

·         Azure Connect

Pay close attention to Affinity Group. Affinity groups are intended to group dependent Windows Azure Services and deploy those in one place if possible.

Think of it as a Failover Cluster. Azure will deploy those services of yours in one place if possible. The benefits here would be lower cost (bandwidth within data center is free of charge but transactions would still be charged), performance – especially if your services are dependent on each other. Key word: Network hops

Windows Azure will optimize the deployment on services where you have specified two or more hosted services in the same Affinity Group.

Hosted services and storage services can both be located in the same Affinity Group.

What about the deployment?

- Start to get your Apps running locally.

Explore the different stages in deployment: Staging vs. Production, port number and protocol, service definition changes, service configuration changes, affinity, upgrade domains, operating system versions.

If you`re using SQL server and planning to deploy applications on Azure, you should also have a database migration plan from SQL Server to SQL Azure. So a thing that is important is to know the difference between SQL Server and SQL Azure. And how would you backup your databases in SQL Azure?

When should you use Azure Connect? Would it be suitable for an IT-pro to secure, create, connect, and manage this?

The different roles: Web/Worker/VM – what suits you and your applications? Don’t get caught of consider the VM Role as an IaaS solution, but rather a new method for deployment.

And last: What about PowerShell? If you`re experienced with this scripting tool, then you might find your skills very useful here as well. You can deploy, manage, monitor, and respond to the events in Azure with PowerShell – and that`s quite what an IT-pro should do - also in the Cloud.