
Sep 09, 2014
In my previous blog post (The basics of cloud computing), I explained the concept of cloud computing, cloud services, types of cloud and the Microsoft cloud technologies available. Today, I’ll specifically look at Microsoft Azure, a cloud technology that provides a comprehensive set of services for building cloud-based solutions. Below I have explained in great detail the different app services, data services, services to support networking, and data storage options available with Microsoft Azure. App services- Media Services: Microsoft Azure Media services enable developers to create applications that provide live and on-demand streaming media, with capabilities for converting media formats, encoding content, and other media-related functionality.
- Active Directory: Microsoft Azure Active Directory provides Active Directory based authentication and identity management for custom cloud-based applications built on Microsoft Azure. You can synchronise Microsoft Azure Active Directory with your corporate Active Directory to provide a single sign-on solution for cloud services.
- Multi-Factor Authentication: Microsoft Azure Multi-Factor Authentication enables you to enhance security for cloud and on-premises applications by including identity verification checks, for example by email, phone call, or text message.
- Service Bus: The Microsoft Azure Service Bus provides a message queuing solution for applications that need a scalable and reliable message-based communication architecture.
- Notification Hubs: These provide a solution for push notifications that applications can broadcast to subscribers.
- Caching: Microsoft Azure Caching provides a data cache service for applications.
- BizTalk Services: Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services enables enterprise application integration (EAI) for business-to-business (B2B) scenarios.
- Cloud Services: This provides the foundation for cloud applications and services, enabling you to deploy and manage custom services easily.
- Web Sites: This provides a scalable cloud infrastructure for Web applications.
- Mobile Services: This enables you to build cloud-based applications for mobile devices.
- Virtual Machines: This provides cloud-based hosting for Hyper-V virtual machine images, which you can create from a gallery of built-in images or upload.
- Storage. Microsoft Azure Storage includes tables, for key-value pair and other NoSQL formats, and a blob store in which you can create a hierarchy of containers for binary large object (Blob) files.
- SQL Database. Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a PaaS database server service based on SQL Server.
- SQL Reporting. Microsoft Azure SQL Reporting provides SQL Server Reporting Services capabilities for Microsoft Azure SQL Database data sources.
- Backup. Microsoft Azure Backup enables you to use backup functionality in Windows Server and System center to perform cloud-based backups.
- Hyper-V Recovery Manager. Hyper-V Recover Manager provides cloud-based coordination and management of virtual machine replication and failover between private cloud data centers.
- HDInsight. Microsoft Azure HDInsight provides a Hadoop cluster service for big data analysis.
- Virtual Network network provides a virtual private network (VPN) solution that you can use to create virtual networks for Microsoft Azure based services and connectivity to your on-premises networks.
- Traffic Manager provides network load balancing for Microsoft Azure services.
CREATE CREDENTIAL AzureStore WITH IDENTITY = ‘AzStoreAct’, SECRET = ‘XXXXXXXXXX-Access Key-XXXXXXXXXX’;
Step 2: Back up the database to the URL for the Microsoft Azure Storage container where you want to store the backup, specifying the credential you created previously. The following code example shows how to use the Transact-SQL BACKUP DATABASE statement to back up the MyDBdatabase to a container named backups in the AzStoreActMicrosoft Azure Storage account.BACKUP DATABASE MyDB TO URL = ‘AzStoreAct.blob.core.windows.net/backups/mydb.bak’ WITH CREDENTIAL = ‘AzureStore’;
Using an AlwaysOn Availability Group Replica in Microsoft Azure for High Availability Another way that you can leverage Microsoft Azure for disaster recovery in a hybrid cloud environment is to include one or more Microsoft Azure virtual machines running SQL Server as a secondary replica in an AlwaysOn Availability Group. To use a Microsoft Azure virtual machine in a SQL Server AlwaysOn availability group, consider the following guidelines:- Use asynchronous commit instead of synchronous commit to avoid performance issues created by network latency.
- The Microsoft Azure virtual machine must be a node in the same Windows Server Clustering Services (WSCS) cluster as the on-premises replicas, and must therefore, be joined to the same domain. To support this requirement, you must create a Microsoft Azure virtual network so that the virtual machine in Microsoft Azure can connect to the on-premises domain controller.
- If you plan to use multiple replicas in Microsoft Azure virtual machines, they should be provisioned in the same Microsoft Azure availability set.
- When multiple availability group replicas are hosted in Microsoft Azure virtual machines, you may experience IP address conflicts caused by cluster nodes being assigned the same virtual IP address for the cluster name.
- Similarly, using an Availability Group Listener with multiple Microsoft Azure virtual machines requires a workaround as described here.
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