Developing Microsoft Azure and Web Services

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Wikipedia

Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure (/ˈæʒər, ˈeɪʒər/ AZH-ər, AY-zhər, UK also /ˈæzjʊər, ˈeɪzjʊər/ AZ-ure, AY-zure), is a cloud computing service operated by Microsoft for application management via Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and supports many different programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.

Azure, announced at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in October 2008, went by the internal project codename “Project Red Dog”, and was formally released in February 2010 as Windows Azure, before being renamed Microsoft Azure on March 25, 2014.

Azure uses large-scale virtualization at Microsoft data centers worldwide and it offers more than 600 services.

Virtual machines, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) allowing users to launch general-purpose Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual machines, as well as preconfigured machine images for popular software packages.
- Most users run Linux on Azure, some of the many Linux distributions offered, including Microsoft’s own Linux-based Azure Sphere.
App services, platform as a service (PaaS) environment letting developers easily publish and manage websites.
Websites, Azure Web Sites allows developers to build sites using ASP.NET, PHP, Node.js, Java, or Python and can be deployed using FTP, Git, Mercurial, Team Foundation Server or uploaded through the user portal. This feature was announced in preview form in June 2012 at the Meet Microsoft Azure event. Customers can create websites in PHP, ASP.NET, Node.js, or Python, or select from several open source applications from a gallery to deploy. This comprises one aspect of the platform as a service (PaaS) offerings for the Microsoft Azure Platform. It was renamed Web Apps in April 2015.
WebJobs, applications that can be deployed to an App Service environment to implement background processing that can be invoked on a schedule, on demand, or run continuously. The Blob, Table and Queue services can be used to communicate between WebApps,XYZ,iOS Software and WebJobs and to provide state.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) allows you to quickly deploy a production ready kubernetes cluster in Azure. Azure is responsible for managing the control plane and customers get the flexibility to choose/scale the data place (kubernetes worker nodes).
Azure Active Directory is used to synchronize on-premises directories and enable SSO (Single Sign On).
Azure Active Directory B2C allows the use of consumer identity and access management in the cloud.
Azure Active Directory Domain Services is used to join Azure virtual machines to a domain without domain controllers.
Azure information protection can be used to protect sensitive information.
Azure Active Directory External Identities are set of capabilities which allow organizations to collaborate with external users including customers and partners.
Mobile Engagement collects real-time analytics that highlight users’ behavior. It also provides push notifications to mobile devices.
HockeyApp can be used to develop, distribute, and beta-test mobile apps.
Storage Services provides REST and SDK APIs for storing and accessing data on the cloud.
Table Service lets programs store structured text in partitioned collections of entities that are accessed by partition key and primary key. Azure Table Service is a NoSQL non-relational database.
Blob Service allows programs to store unstructured text and binary data as blobs that can be accessed by an HTTP(S) path. Blob service also provides security mechanisms to control access to data.
Queue Service lets programs communicate asynchronously by message using queues.
File Service allows storing and access of data on the cloud using the REST APIs or the SMB protocol.
Azure Communication Services offers an SDK for creating web and mobile communications applications that include SMS, video calling, VOIP and PSTN calling, and web based chat.

Azure Data Explorer provides big data analytics and data-exploration capabilities
Azure Search provides text search and a subset of OData’s structured filters using REST or SDK APIs.
Cosmos DB is a NoSQL database service that implements a subset of the SQL SELECT statement on JSON documents.
Azure Cache for Redis is a managed implementation of Redis.
StorSimple manages storage tasks between on-premises devices and cloud storage.
Azure SQL Database works to create, scale and extend applications into the cloud using Microsoft SQL Server technology. It also integrates with Active Directory, Microsoft System Center and Hadoop.
Azure Synapse Analytics is a fully managed cloud data warehouse.
Azure Data Factory, is a data integration service that allows creation of data-driven workflows in the cloud for orchestrating and automating data movement and data transformation.
Azure Data Lake is a scalable data storage and analytic service for big data analytics workloads that require developers to run massively parallel queries.
Azure HDInsight is a big data relevant service, that deploys Hortonworks Hadoop on Microsoft Azure, and supports the creation of Hadoop clusters using Linux with Ubuntu.
Azure Stream Analytics is a Serverless scalable event processing engine that enables users to develop and run real-time analytics on multiple streams of data from sources such as devices, sensors, web sites, social media, and other applications.

The Microsoft Azure Service Bus allows applications running on Azure premises or off-premises devices to communicate with Azure. This helps to build scalable and reliable applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The Azure service bus supports four different types of communication mechanisms:

Event Hubs, which provide event and telemetry ingress to the cloud at massive scale, with low latency and high reliability. For example, an event hub can be used to track data from cell phones such as coordinating with a GPS in real time.
Queues, which allow one-directional communication. A sender application would send the message to the service bus queue, and a receiver would read from the queue. Though there can be multiple readers for the queue only one would process a single message.
Topics, which provide one-directional communication using a subscriber pattern. It is similar to a queue, however, each subscriber will receive a copy of the message sent to a Topic. Optionally the subscriber can filter out messages based on specific criteria defined by the subscriber.
Relays, which provide bi-directional communication. Unlike queues and topics, a relay doesn’t store in-flight messages in its own memory. Instead, it just passes them on to the destination application.

A PaaS offering that can be used for encoding, content protection, streaming, or analytics.

A global content delivery network (CDN) for audio, video, applications, images, and other static files. It can be used to cache static assets of websites geographically closer to users to increase performance. The network can be managed by a REST-based HTTP API.

Azure has 94 point of presence locations worldwide (also known as Edge locations) as of April 2020.

Azure Web Apps is a cloud computing based platform for hosting websites, created and operated by Microsoft. It is a platform as a service (PaaS) which allows publishing Web apps running on multiple frameworks and written in different programming languages (.NET, node.js, PHP, Python and Java), including Microsoft proprietary ones and 3rd party ones. Microsoft Azure Web Sites became available in its first preview version in June 2012, and an official version (“General Availability”) was announced in June 2013. Microsoft Azure Web Sites was originally named Windows Azure Web Sites, but was renamed as part of a re-branding move across Azure in March 2014. It was subsequently renamed “App Service” in March 2015.

Microsoft initially offered a basic web hosting service as part of Office Live Small Business, which was launched in late 2007. Office Live Small Business offered customers free and commercial web hosting with a built-in system for creating websites based on built-in templates and a site creation wizard.

When Microsoft started allocating resources into developing its numerous cloud solutions, a group was formed in Microsoft Azure to develop Microsoft Azure Web Sites. Microsoft Azure Web Sites was announced in June 2012 as a preview release.

In parallel, Microsoft developed Microsoft Azure Pack, which offers the same technology that can be installed as a private-cloud on sets of servers at a customer’s site and under direct customer control.

In mid-2013, both Microsoft Azure Web Sites and Microsoft Azure Pack were officially released to the public.

Microsoft Azure Web Sites is a web-hosting platform that supports multiple technologies, and programming languages (.NET, node.js, PHP, Python). Users with Microsoft Azure subscriptions can create Websites, and deploy content and code into the Web sites. Microsoft Azure Web Sites supports a website creation wizard which allows the user to create a blank site, or create a site based on one of several available pre-configured images from the website gallery.

As part of creating the website, the site’s URL is assigned a subdomain of azurewebsites.net. In various for-pay tiers, a website can be assigned one or more custom domains. This is implemented by setting a CNAME record on the DNS server that hosts the user’s domain’s zone to point at the user’s web site hosted in Azure. On some for-pay tiers, the user has the added option of uploading an SSL certificate and configuring the site to be bound to HTTPS.

Once a site has been created, the user can add or modify its content using multiple deployment methods, including Web Deploy (MSDeploy), TFS (via Visual Studio), FTP, FTPS, WebMatrix, CodePlex, GitHub, Dropbox, Bitbucket, Mercurial and local Git.

Other features of Azure Web Sites are:

User-selected placement in one or multiple data centers across the globe.
Uptime SLA of 99.95% for Standard tier customers.
Continuous monitoring of site metrics such as CPU time, Data in, Data out, HTTP errors and additional metrics.
Setting of monitoring alerts.
Log collection and failed request tracing for tracking and troubleshooting.
Deployment of a Microsoft SQL or MySQL database to be used with web applications.
Websites are hosted on IIS 8.0 running on a custom version of Windows Server 2012.
Support for 4 service tiers: Free, Shared, Basic and Standard (dedicated).
In the Basic and Standard tiers, support for 3 VM sizes for scaling up.
In the for-pay tiers, support for manual or automatic scaling-out with up to 10 instances of VMs.
Support for integration with Azure Traffic Manager to route traffic manually or automatically between websites in different regions across the globe.
Authentication using Microsoft Azure Active Directory.

Microsoft Azure Web Sites is implemented as websites that are dynamically created on-demand on servers running Windows Server 2012 and IIS 8.0. When a client posts a request to a web site, Microsoft Azure Web Sites dynamically provisions the site on one of the Azure virtual machines pointing it at content stored in Azure Storage containers. The Azure Virtual Machines are deployed in groups called “Stamps”, which may contain hundreds of such machines. Microsoft deploys these stamps in its Azure data centers across the world, and adds more stamps as demand grows.

Azure Web Sites services are offered in 4 tiers. The entry-level tier is the “free” tier. The free tier supports up to 10 websites with 1 GB of content storage, and is limited to 165 MB of daily data egress. The first for-pay tier is the “Shared” tier. Shared tier sites support custom domains and can be scaled out to up to 6 instances. The current highest for-pay tier is the “Standard” tier. Standard tier websites run on VMs dedicated exclusively to a single customer’s websites. The Standard tier supports SSL (both SNI and IP-based), scaling out to up to 10 instances, and file storage of up to 50 GB of content.

Basic and Standard tier websites can be deployed on 3 sizes of virtual machines: Small VMs with 1 virtual CPU and 1.75GB of RAM, Medium VMs with 2 virtual CPUs and 3.5 GB of RAM, and Large VMs with 4 virtual CPUs and 7GB of available RAM.