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.
Earlier last week Microsoft announced the public preview of the VM Instance Metadata service. This service allows you to query information about a VM, from inside the VM itself, it’s something that has been available on AWS for a long time and has some really interesting uses for users or code running inside your virtual machines. In this post we’ll dig a bit deeper into the service and how it can be used.
Back in November I published an article on Azure Active Directory Domain Services (AAD DS), detailing some of the limitations of the service and what it is and isn’t intended for. If you’ve not read that I recommend going back and reading through that first so this article makes sense.
Since this article was published there have been some big updates to the service that mean some of these limitations have gone away, so I thought it was time to detail some of these changes and what they mean for Azures Domain Controller as a Service offering.
Microsoft’s Log Analytics platform, part of the OMS Suite, allows you to pull in and analyse data from a wide variety of source for your operational needs. One of these sources of data is from Azure Monitor, the monitoring solution built into the Azure platform.
Azure Monitor is great on it’s own when you want to look at performance or log data for a specific resource, but when you want to look at this data across your whole estate and be able to dashboard and alert on this, you need to aggregate and analyse this in Log Analytics.
Since writing this article I’ve released a VS Code Extension that installs these snippets with a single click, see here.
In my previous post on using VS Code for authoring ARM templates I recommended using an ARM Snippets from the plugin gallery. However since then I have come to realise this plugin is fairly limited in the amount of plugins, and difficult to extend. Given this I would now recommend utilising the set of snippets provided by the Azure Cross Platform Tooling Samples
