In my last article we discussed the various different options for providing SMB shares in Azure given the lack of shared storage. One of the options we discussed for this was using a new feature of Server 2016 – Storage Replica, and in this article we will take a deep dive into how to setup this up in Azure. This Windows Server feature allows you to replicate data between two servers (or two clusters) and could potentially be a great solution for replicating shares in Azure, if you can cope with the limitations.

In an ideal world, all our cloud applications would be designed from the ground up to work with the cloud, they would be designed to work with cloud principals, make use of PaaS services and provide high availability. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. We are regularly tasked with moving existing on-premises applications into the cloud as a “lift and shift” type operation, until they can be redesigned to be cloud native.

I previously wrote about using VS Code for authoring Azure Resource Manger templates, in particular about using the snippets from the cross platform toolkit to create skeletons for many ARM resources. In this post I documented the manual installation process for these snippets, as there was not a VS Code extension to install these automatically. This is no longer the case, I have recently published a VS Code extension that takes these snippets (with attribution) and packages them up and makes them available in the VS Code marketplace for easy installation and updating.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are a great resource for deploying Azure infrastructure, including virtual machines, in a declarative manner. However, using an ARM template to deploy a VM will only get you as far as having a VM deployed and the operating system installed and running. The next step is to get any applications and supporting software installed on those machines. Of course you can RDP to machine and do this manually, but this breaks down quickly if you have lots of machines or need to regularly deploy VM’s.

Disaster recovery is, or should be, a must for for many production applications. Having the ability to recover your application in a separate geographic location should a major incident occur is vital to the continued availability of your service. Microsoft have offered a DR service called Azure Site Recovery (ASR) for some time now, but this has been focused on taking on-premises applications and providing a DR solution for these in Azure.

At this months Build conference there where lot’s of new Azure announcements and in particular lots of new features for Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. Ryan Jones. PM on ARM templates, did a breakout session talking about all this new functionality which is available now on channel 9. I want to focus on one of the big improvements, at least from perspective, and that is we now have proper conditional logic in ARM templates!

Last week at build Microsoft announced a preview of MYSQL and PostgreSQL databases as a PaaS service running in Azure. Since then, we’ve not yet seen full documentation of the ARM templates required to deploy these, however some example templates did appear on Github a few days ago that provide enough information to begin creating templates that use these two database services. Both databases look to follow the same design, with just a variation in type name.

Today at the Build Conference, Microsoft announced the Azure Mobile app for iOS and Android (with a UWP app to come soon). I’ve had access to this app for a while during the preview and whilst it’s never going to replace the web portal for the majority of Azure work and has fairly limited functionality at the minute, it does provide a handy tool for times you need to make a change on the go or just need to check a setting or view some stats.

Microsoft have now added first class conditions to the language so this workaround is no longer required. See this article on how to use this feature.** ARM Templates are a great tool for deploying complex sets of resources in Azure, however as it currently stands there is no concept of an “If” statement in a template. This can make it much more difficult to support the re-use of code and to avoid duplication in your templates, if you have to create a whole new set of templates which are 95% the same but with one section being different.

Resource Manager Locks provide a way for administrators to lock down Azure resources to prevent deletion or changing of a resource. These locks sit outside of the Role Based Access Controls (RBAC) hierarchy and when applied will place the restriction on the resource for all users. These are very useful when you have an important resource in your subscription which users should not be able to delete or change and can help prevent accidental and malicious changes or deletion.