Deploying Azure Marketplace VMs

The first step is to gather information about the Market Place Virtual Machine (VM) image that we want to deploy. For this example I decided to deploy a Tableau Server image.

Login-AzureRmAccount

$location = 'eastus'
  
Get-AzureRmVMImagePublisher -Location $location `
    | Where-Object -Property PublisherName -Like Tableau*
 
$publisherName = 'tableau'
  
Get-AzureRmVMImageOffer -Location $location `
                        -PublisherName $publisherName
 
$offer = 'tableau-server'
  
Get-AzureRmVMImageSku -Location $location `
                      -PublisherName $publisherName `
                      -Offer $offer `
      | Select-Object -Property 'Skus'

Skus                  
----                  
bring-your-own-license

Now that we have the image information, it’s time to create an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Template.

Geo-HA Service Fabric Cluster

One of the biggest challenges that we face when we build an Internet-scale solution, is high availability across geographic locations (Geo-HA). Why is this important? Well, there can be a few different reasons. The most common reason, is to be able to survive data center outages. Another reason, is to bring services closer to end users so that we can provide good user experiences.

Geo-HA brings challenges to the table. For example, should we use an Active-Passive or Active-Active strategy for data across regions? Keeping in mind that Active-Active is difficult to get right, we need to take time to analyze and to make the correct choices. We need to consider our Disaster recovery (DR) plan, target RPO and RTO. Azure has a whole bunch of mechanisms for replication, backup and monitoring, so how do we decide what’s the right combination?

Today’s Internet-scale services are built using microservices. Service Fabric is a next-generation middleware platform used for building enterprise-class, Tier-1 services. This microservices platform allows us to build scalable, highly available, reliable, and easy to manage solutions. It addresses the significant challenges in developing and managing stateful services. The Reliable Actors API is one of two high-level frameworks provided by Service Fabric, and it is based on the Actor pattern. This API gives us an asynchronous, single-threaded programming model that simplifies our code while still providing the advantages of scalability and reliability guarantees offered by Service Fabric.

A Service Fabric cluster is HA within its geographic region by default. Thinking about our heritage of on premise data centers, we’ve poured thousands of man-hours to deploy Disaster Recovery sites in secondary physical locations, because we know that everything is possible. Over the past few years, we’ve experienced many interesting scenarios, for example, a cut cable, or a faulty DNS entry broke the Internet. So why should we do anything differently in the cloud? We must treat each region as we treat our own data centers and think about Geo-HA.

The rest of this post is about taking high availably to the next level by deploying a Geo-HA Service Fabric cluster.

Lost in Translation – Azure Networking

In today’s highly connected world, many professionals use Cisco’s terminology to discuss networking. Using the wrong terms can lead to lengthy, confusing arguments. The goal of this post, is to help those of us who don’t speak the language, to communicate effectively with others about Azure Networking.

I’ve been dabbling in the IT Pro space for a few months now, and it’s been a challenge to discuss Azure Networking. Coming from a development background, my reference to networking was Azure. That definitely made it difficult, because I spoke about Virtual Networks, Subnets and Network Security Groups. To help me sort things out, I asked a colleague of mine to identify the equivalencies between Cisco and Azure Networking terminology.

Let’s dive in!

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While I was playing around with the Azure Resource Manager Copy Operation, I started thinking about what I could do with it. The first wild idea that popped into my head was, to use it to deploy multi-geo environments from a single ARM Template.

Alright, some of you might think that it’s not such great idea, and I can appreciate that. But I’m just too curious, so let’s give this a chance.

Opening Ports on Cloud Services

There are scenarios that warrants us to open ports of the Windows Firewall. Imagine an application that coordinates work across many compute nodes. The workload coordinator needs to know and manage each compute node.

The diagram above, depicts a Virtual Machine that has direct access to instances of a Cloud Service without going through a Load Balancer. Both the Virtual Machine and Cloud Service are deployed to a Virtual Network on Microsoft Azure. Using Internal Endpoints in this scenario, would not yield the desired configuration. Endpoints are defined at the Cloud Service boundary and are IP addresses belong to the Data Center’s Network Address Space. Therefore, In order to allow the Virtual Machine to communicate over specific ports to individual Cloud Service instances, we need to use PowerShell and a Startup Task to configure the Windows Firewall.

Configuring Internal Endpoints

There are many scenarios where Internal Endpoints make sense. Imagine a web application that needs to communicate with a middle tier. The communication between both Cloud Services does not need to leave Microsoft Azure networks. The diagram above depicts a scenario where a Web Role has access to a middle tier Cloud Service without going through the public Internet.

Role instances running in a Cloud Service on Microsoft Azure communicate through internal and external connections that vary depending on the type of communication that is needed. An internal endpoint can connect by using a protocol of HTTP, TCP or UDP.

The configuration of an Internal Endpoint is done through the Service Definition. Below is the template used to describe what can be done in terms of Endpoint configurations. 

Deploying a Cloud Service to a VNet

In a recent post about Microsoft Azure Virtual Networks, I made the recommendation that Cloud Services should be deployed to Microsoft Azure Virtual Networks. The driving factor behind this recommendation comes from my personal real-world experience, where I learned the hard way, that moving a deployed Cloud Service to a Virtual Network meant downtime…

Why are Virtual Networks Important?

As a developer, I used to forget about Virtual Networks. And to be fair, I shied away from pretty much everything that can be considered as infrastructure.

Microsoft Azure is a game changer! It requires Developers and IT Pros to collaborate on projects. Let’s take a moment to set things right. Developers and IT Pros are not competing against each other in this new world. They collaborate in order to produce value for the business and customers.

As we move to a Cloud First and Mobile First world, security is more important than it ever was. On Microsoft Azure, the first step towards securing your application resources is to create a Virtual Network.