Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

List of all posts from this series: http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2014/11/azure-blog-post-marathon-is-ready-to.html Short Description  Azure Multi-Factor Authentication is an authentication service that requires more than one authentication method. For example you need to enter the password and a code that is send over SMS or email. Main Features  Authentication method supported In this moment the fallowing authentication methods are supported: Biometric (you are) Passwords (you know) Phone or Device (you have) Azure Active Directory It is fully integrated with Azure Active Directory. In this way all the authentications that are made over Azure Active Directory can use this service. On-Premises Resources If you integrate Azure Active Directory with your on-premises one you can secure the access to all your on-premises resources using Azure Multi-Factor Authentication. Web Application integrations Using Azure Multi-Factor Authentication Server we can integrate t

List of all posts from this series: http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2014/11/azure-blog-post-marathon-is-ready-to.html Short Description  Azure Site Recovery offer us a way to manage and control the replication and recovery actions of our machines. We have the ability to replicate our entire data center. Using this service you can replicate your datacenter on Azure, without having to reverse resources in advance. Main Features  Hybrid Solution You have the ability to replicate virtual machines that are on on-premises data centers on Azure or on another hosting providers. Custom Replication Policy You have the full control to the policies that are used to create the replications. In this way we can manage the replications use cases. Cross-Technologies  Site Recovery is not adding another replication mechanism over existing one. It is only the orchestration over the existing one. Technologies like SQL Server AlwaysOn, System Center, SAN or Hyper-V can be used. Ability to se

List of all posts from this series: http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2014/11/azure-blog-post-marathon-is-ready-to.html Short Description  How nice would be a feature that allow us to create automatically backups of our system and store them in a reliable location from where we can restore it when needed. This is called Azure Backup and can be used with success to create backups of our systems. Main Features  Operation System Supported In the current version (in preview) we can create backups for Windows 8.1, Windows 8 and Windows 7 (64b with SP1). Access Using management tools we can specify users that have access to this backups. In this way only authorized users can access the backup content. Management Tool We can manage the backups using different tools from Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 essential or System Center 2012. For all of this, we are using DPM (Data Protection Manager) to manage the backups. The cloud storage that is used to create the backup itself c

List of all posts from this series: http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2014/11/azure-blog-post-marathon-is-ready-to.html Short Description  Azure Data Factory is one of the services that is part of data analytics functionality offered by Microsoft Azure. This service can be used with success when you need to orchestrate and manage data movement and different data transformation. Main Features  Move data between different sources Using Azure Data Factory you can move data between different storages, from the file based one, to SQL and even NoSQL storages. This can be very useful when you need to change the location of data to be able to process or store it for long time. On-premises and Cloud The data storage used as input or output can be not only on Microsoft Azure but also in another storages that can be on-premises. Data Source Aggregation We have the ability to combine multiple data sources in only one data sources. In this way we can easily merge different data sources.

List of all posts from this series: http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2014/11/azure-blog-post-marathon-is-ready-to.html Short Description  Azure Stor Simple it is a hybrid cloud storage solution based on Microsoft Azure and StorSimple. It is based on a property device that offer an overview view over all storages (on-premises and cloud). Main Features  Lower storage cost This solution is powerful enough to allocate storage only when is needed, based on company and system requirements. Compression To reduce the necessary space, content can be compresses. In this way the space used to store data is reduces drastically. Deduplication In enterprise, all the data is versioned. Because of this the size of the storage can increase drastically. StorSimple is smart enough to detect data duplication between different versions of the same data. In this way the size of the storage is decrease drastically. Integration with MMC (Microsoft Management Console) and iSCSI It is fully int

List of all posts from this series: http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2014/11/azure-blog-post-marathon-is-ready-to.html Short Description  Azure RemoteApp gives us the possibility to use Microsoft RemoteApp functionality over Azure infrastructure. A part of services available on Remote Desktop can be used using Azure RemoteApp. Main Features  Storage You are not limited anymore on your on-premises storage. You can use as much space you need when you are using Azure RemoteApp. Scalability The hardware limitation generated by your infrastructure is removed. You can use as many resources you need. Global Reach  From any point of the glob users can connect to RemoteApp over Azure infrastructure over a secure and reliable channel. Cross Platform Users can connect to RemoteApp using any operating system from Windows to iOS to Mac OS and Android. Hybrid Collections Allow users to use resources that are hosted on Azure and on-premises backend. In this way you can store resource

List of all posts from this series: http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2014/11/azure-blog-post-marathon-is-ready-to.html Short Description  HDInsight enables us to provision Hadoop and HBase cluster over Azure infrastructure. This mean that we can use Hadoop over Azure platform without having to install, provision and make complex configurations of Hadoop. We can use HDInsight as an out of the box Hadoop solution. Main Features  Hadoop Version The Hadoop distribution that is running on Azure is developed and maintained by Hortonworks Data Platform. New version releasing It seems that the new versions of Hadoop reach Azure faster and faster. If in the past it use to take 4-6 months for a new version of Hadoop to reach Azure and HDInsight, now it is taking only a few weeks. HDFS Hadoop Distributed File System(HDFS) exist also in HDInsight giving us the possibility to store data in a distributed file system. MapReduce The same programming model that we already know from Hadoo

List of all posts from this series: http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2014/11/azure-blog-post-marathon-is-ready-to.html Short Description  Nowadays all features and functionality that is exposed by an online application needs to be exposed over an API also. We need to be able to integrate our system with custom devices and applications. Because of this it is important to be able to expose our system using a consistent API, easy to manage and maintain. For things like this Azure API Management was introduce. Using this service we can publish our application to our clients (public or private way) in a scalable, secure with tracing and audit capabilities. Main Features  Traceability It has the capability to monitor in real time the load, the number of connections and many more. In this way we can take decision in real time to scale. The audit can be consumed later on by an analytic system and detect patterns or make predictions. Connect with multiple backends We have the capabi

List of all posts from this series: http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2014/11/azure-blog-post-marathon-is-ready-to.html Short Description Azure Notification Hub allow us to send notifications from any backend (hosted on cloud or on-premises) to our devices/clients. I don’t know I you had the opportunity to work on a system that needs to work with different PNS providers (iOS, Android, WP), but managing all different platforms, tokens, trigger notification for each device of group of devices can be a time consuming task not only for developers but also for the person that trigger the notification. For use cases like this Azure Notification Hub can become our best friend. Main Features Platform Agnostic We can send notifications to any kind of device or system. From Android to iOS, to desktop application or even kindles. Focus on content Azure Notification Hubs enable us to focus on the content that we want to send to our applications and not on the notification system platfo

List of all posts from this series: http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2014/11/azure-blog-post-marathon-is-ready-to.html Short Description  Imagine a world where everything is managed by cloud (from network, to load balancer or operating system). Using Azure Cloud Services we are a step closer to this dream, companies can focus on their product and less on infrastructure. We only need to develop our system and deployed it (more or less :-)). A definition that I really it from the pricing web page of Azure Cloud Services: Azure Cloud Services eliminates the need to manage server infrastructure and helps you quickly build, deploy and manage modern applications. In general a system contains one or more layers divided on different nodes. Nowadays a system contain one or more web sites and a group of system for backend processing – multi tier application. Azure Cloud Services manage everything that is under our Web Roles and Worker Roles. We only need to create the deployment packages of

List of all posts from this series:  http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2014/11/azure-blog-post-marathon-is-ready-to.html Short Description  Azure File Storage is a shared storage for any kind of applications and systems. Is constructed over Azure Storage and is used to share data and files across applications components. Content from this repository can be accessed not only by applications using mounted shares but also via File Storage API. Main Features  Cloud applications and On-premises The content from Azure File Storage can be accessed not only by virtual machines that are running on Azure, but also from On-premises system using sharing capabilities (over File Storage API). SMB 2.1 Protocol Azure File Storage support Service Message Protocol version 2.1 that can be used to access shared file from different networks nodes and system.  This protocol was introduced with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and is used worldwide for file sharing. Simultaneously Shares Mult

List of all posts from this series: http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2014/11/azure-blog-post-marathon-is-ready-to.html Short Description  Azure Queue Storage is a services part of Azure Storage that offer queueing support. It is a simple queue services that can be accessed from anywhere over HTTP and HTTPS protocol. Main Features  Size First think that comes in my mind is the size of the queue. Because this service is construed over Azure Storage, the maximum size of a queue(s) can be hundreds of terra bytes (under the same storage account). This can useful when we need to store large amount of messages in a queue. RESTfull Like all Azure Services, the Queue Storage can be accessed and manage over a REST API. On top of this there are libraries for different programing languages like C#, NodeJS, and so on. Batch Support For reading messages from queue, we have the ability to consume them in batches of 32 messages. Transactions support (kind off) When consuming messages fr

List of all posts from this series: http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2014/11/azure-blog-post-marathon-is-ready-to.html Short Description  Azure Table Services are part of Azure Storage and give us the possibility to store large amount of data in a structured way. It allow us to store collections of entities in so called table. If we look over this service from NoSQL side, we could say that so called table in Azure Table are the collections of NoSQL world. Main Features  A part of the features of Azure Table are similar with Azure Blob Storage. This is happening because both services are constructed over the same infrastructure and have a common base. Different entities schema in the same table We are allowed to store under the same table entities with different schema. For example we can store entity ‘Car’ and ‘House’ in the same table as long as in the moment when we retrieve the entity we can detect the type of entity. Size The size of tables is unlimited. We can store la

List of all posts from this series: http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2014/11/azure-blog-post-marathon-is-ready-to.html Short Description  Azure Storage is one of foundation components of Microsoft Azure. It offers cloud storage in a scalable and redundant way for multiple use cases. It can store petabytes of data without any kind of problem, but in the same time is flexible and can handle heavy traffic very easily. In this moment Azure Storage had 4 components that are defining it: Blobs Tables Queues Files … it is pretty hard for me to talk about all of them in only one post. Because of this I decided to split this discussion into 4 separately post, that will target each of this services. This post is dedicated to Azure Storage Blobs. Short Description (second try) Azure Storage Blobs allow us to store any kind of data into Azure. From documents, to videos, to databases backup, anything that is a binary content can be stored there. For normal use cases Blob storage is