Azure Development Best Practices to Simplify Cloud Services
08 Feb 2016
Cloud computing provides a robust infrastructure to scale your apps effortlessly. Microsoft Azure is an easy-to-use cloud platform which helps you design, develop and deploy your enterprise applications on cloud or on-premise at reduced costs. It provides a range of services which includes IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.
Cloud Application Building Blocks
- Activate Azure Subscription: Once you have laid down your cloud-based application plan, create an Azure account using a Microsoft or your business/organization’s email which is sourced within Azure Active Directory. The account administrator can either create an individual setup or add upto 10 co-administrators per subscription depending on the required space, storage or workload of the project. Subscription plan in Azure account can be upgraded or downgraded anytime by the administrator considering the changes in business plan.
- Setup & Configure Your Datacenter: Microsoft’s datacenteres are spread across 19 geographical locations, which helps to reduce latency and speed of data throughput. Choose the datacenter that is in proximity from the list of datacenter locations available in the setup panel. You can also use the tools available on azurespeed.com that provides more options to check other latency services like Latency Test, CDN Test, Cloud Region Finder, Traffic manager and more. While configuring your virtual machine, try to have less number of small instances to avoid redundancy and test your configurations to see how your app performs on a given amount of load.
- Manage Scalability As Per Traffic: Business patterns like increased demand or an unpredictable crunch can make you scale your configurations and/or subscription. The scale tab in the management portal allows you to configure and scale up/down web apps as required and implements the changes immediately. You can switch the subscription plan from your current mode to Free, Shared, Basic, Standard, or Premium mode. Select standard or premium subscription plans in case of heavy load or traffic as they are the most robust and flexible ones.
- Take Advantage of Azure Resources: Azure, as a cloud development platform, has a variety of tools to test your website, run web analytics, deploy slots to test inproduction using staged sites, monitor performance, debug and route traffic. Perform load tests and remote debugging with Visual Studio Tool. Web analytic tools like App insights, New Relic, Google Analytics or WebTrends will help you measure the traffic and other insights without a hitch. You can also set up alerts for various metrics such as CPU Time, HTTP Client and HTTP Server Errors to monitor your web app functionalities.
- Secure Your App: Doing a security check and resolving the issues in your early development process may seem hectic and expensive. Even though Azure is a secure platform, it is good to plan the best practices for strengthening security of your application. Use Azure Key Vault that safeguards the cryptographic keys and secrets utilized by cloud applications. You can create keys to develop, test and control the factors that access or encrypt the data and then migrate them to productions keys. Permission for such keys will be allotted by the security administrators when needed.
With the above mentioned Azure best practices you can set up a robust app development environment that ensures success for your business. Rishabh Software is a Microsoft Gold Partner, and has helped many small & medium organizations to achieve competitive edge through Microsoft Development Services. Our team of Microsoft certified developers have deployed cloud solutions for retail, banking, education, healthcare, logistics & supply chain.
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