An Azure function is a code triggered by an event whereas an Azure Logic app is a workflow triggered by an event.
Azure Logic App can define a workflow at ease consuming a range of APIs as connectors. These connectors will perform series of actions defined in the workflow. Like Azure Logic Apps, durable Azure Functions can also be used to define workflow in code structure.
Azure Web Job is a piece of code runs in the Azure App services. It is a Cloud Service used to run background tasks. Azure Functions are built on the top of Azure Web Jobs with the added capabilities. The table below differentiates Azure Functions and Web Jobs:
Azure Functions allows a piece of code to be deployed and executed without needing server infrastructure, web server, or any configurations. In addition, azure functions can be written in multiple languages such as C#, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python.
Here are some key concepts related to Azure Functions:
Trigger: A trigger is what causes a function to run. Azure Functions support various triggers, such as HTTP requests, timers, messages from a message queue (like Azure Service Bus or Azure Queue Storage), blob storage events, and more.
Bindings: Bindings are a way to connect input and output data to a function. They simplify the code needed to interact with other Azure services. For example, you can use input bindings to read data from Azure Storage, and output bindings to write data back to it without having to write code for these operations explicitly.
Language Support: Azure Functions supports multiple programming languages, including C#, JavaScript, Python, and more. You can choose the language that best fits your needs and skills.
Durable Functions: This is an extension of Azure Functions that lets you write stateful functions in a serverless environment. It's particularly useful for workflows and scenarios where you need to manage state across multiple function invocations.
Development Tools: You can develop Azure Functions using the Azure Portal, Visual Studio, or other supported IDEs. Azure Functions Core Tools is a set of command-line tools that facilitates local development and testing.
Pricing: Azure Functions pricing is based on the actual execution of functions and the resources consumed by them. You pay only for the compute resources consumed during execution.
To create an Azure Function, you typically follow these steps:
Create a Function App: This is a container for your functions. It provides a way to manage and deploy related functions together.
Create a Function: Once you have a Function App, you can add individual functions to it. Each function can have its own trigger and bindings.
Configure and Test: Configure the function with any necessary settings, including connection strings and other environment variables. Test the function locally before deploying it to Azure.
Deploy: Deploy your function to Azure using the deployment options provided by your development environment.
Monitor and Debug: Azure Functions integrates with Azure Monitor, allowing you to monitor the performance and health of your functions. You can also enable logging and diagnostics to aid in debugging.
Keep in mind that Azure Functions is just one part of the broader Azure ecosystem, and you can integrate functions with other Azure services to build powerful and scalable solutions.
When to use:
Let’s say, you have to send a birthday email to your customers. You’re an ASP.NET web developer. Instead of building a website in ASP.NET, deploy and hosting it on IIS, just for one feature, you can simply write an azure function and put your email login in the function and deploy it on azure cloud. The azure functions will direct connect to your data source, get your customers emails, and send them an email on a scheduled date and time.
Azure functions are best suited for smaller apps have events that can work independently of other websites. Some of the common azure functions are sending emails, starting backup, order processing, task scheduling such as database cleanup, sending notifications, messages, and IoT data processing.
Why use Azure Functions
Here are some of the reasons why you should use azure functions.
Reference: https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/, https://www.serverless360.com/azure-functions
What is Azure Logic Apps?
Azure Logic Apps is a cloud-based platform for creating and running automated workflows that integrate your apps, data, services, and systems. With this platform, you can quickly develop highly scalable integration solutions for your enterprise and business-to-business (B2B) scenarios.
The following list describes just a few example tasks, business processes, and workloads that you can automate using the Logic Apps service:
How logic apps work
In a logic app, each workflow always starts with a single trigger. A trigger fires when a condition is met, for example, when a specific event happens or when data meets specific criteria.
Following the trigger, one or more actions run operations that, for example, process, handle, or convert data that travels through the workflow, or that advance the workflow to the next step.
For example, the following workflow starts with a Dynamics trigger that has a built-in condition named When a record is updated. The actions include transforming XML, calling a web app that updates data, evaluating a condition that controls which actions to take, and sending an email notification with the results. When the trigger detects an event that meets the condition, the trigger fires, and the actions in the workflow start to run. Each time the trigger fires, the Logic Apps service creates a workflow instance that runs the actions.
You can visually create workflows using the Logic Apps designer in the Azure portal, Visual Studio Code, or Visual Studio. Each workflow also has an underlying definition that's described using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). If you prefer, you can edit workflows by changing this JSON definition. For some creation and management tasks, Logic Apps provides Azure PowerShell and Azure CLI command support.
References: https://docs.microsoft.com
What is Azure Active Directory?
Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service, which helps your employees sign in and access resources in:
External resources, such as Microsoft 365, the Azure portal, and thousands of other SaaS applications.
Internal resources, such as apps on your corporate network and intranet, along with any cloud apps developed by your own organization. For more information about creating a tenant for your organization, see Quickstart: Create a new tenant in Azure Active Directory.
Reference: https://docs.microsoft.comwhatis
Azure SQL Database is a relational database-as-a-service (DBaaS) hosted in Azure that falls into the industry category of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
With SQL Server, you can use built-in features and functionality that requires extensive configuration (either on-premises or in an Azure virtual machine). When using SQL Database, you pay-as-you-go with options to scale up or out for greater power with no interruption. SQL Database has some additional features that are not available in SQL Server, such as built-in high availability, intelligence, and management.
Azure SQL Database offers the following deployment options:
Azure App Service enables you to build and host web apps, mobile back ends, and RESTful APIs in the programming language of your choice without managing infrastructure. It offers auto-scaling and high availability, supports both Windows and Linux, and enables automated deployments from GitHub, Azure DevOps, or any Git repo.
App Service not only adds the power of Microsoft Azure to your application, such as security, load balancing, autoscaling, and automated management. You can also take advantage of its DevOps capabilities, such as continuous deployment from Azure DevOps, GitHub, Docker Hub, and other sources, package management, staging environments, custom domain, and TLS/SSL certificates.
Besides App Service, Azure offers other services that can be used for hosting websites and web applications.
Deploy an ASP.NET Core web app: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/
Deploy an ASP.NET web app: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/
Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com, https://www.youtube.com
Autoscale allows you to have the right amount of resources running to handle the load on your application. It allows you to add resources to handle increases in load and also save money by removing resources that are sitting idle. You specify a minimum and maximum number of instances to run and add or remove VMs automatically based on a set of rules. Having a minimum makes sure your application is always running even under no load. Having a maximum limits your total possible hourly cost. You automatically scale between these two extremes using rules you create.
References: https://docs.microsoft.com
Lab on Azure backup
Go to All Services> Storage > Recovery Services Vaults
Provide following information. Name, Subscription, RG, Location
Here we need to follow instructions given in this page.
So lets download Recovery service agent and install it in our on-premise system.
download the second option also (Vault credentials).
Now open the Microsoft Azure Backup in your system. (Recovery service agent)
Click on Register Server option Right side Backup section.
Select the files/folder to backup.
Specify the backup schedule day/time. you can set maximum 3 times per day.
As of now you can skip retention policy. Choose initial backup type 'Online'. Finally click on finish button. Backup schedule for 8PM per day has been created.
But here we will not wait till that time. So we will click on BackUp now link available on right side.
As an organization you need to adopt a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy that keeps your data safe, and your apps and workloads online, when planned and unplanned outages occur.
Azure Recovery Services contributes to your BCDR strategy:
Site Recovery service: Site Recovery helps ensure business continuity by keeping business apps and workloads running during outages. Site Recovery replicates workloads running on physical and virtual machines (VMs) from a primary site to a secondary location. When an outage occurs at your primary site, you fail over to secondary location, and access apps from there. After the primary location is running again, you can fail back to it.
Backup service: The Azure Backup service provides simple, secure, and cost-effective solutions to back up your data and recover it from the Microsoft Azure cloud.
What can I back up?
Azure Backup offers three types of replication to keep your storage/data highly available.
Locally redundant storage (LRS) replicates your data three times (it creates three copies of your data) in a storage scale unit in a datacenter. All copies of the data exist within the same region. LRS is a low-cost option for protecting your data from local hardware failures.
Geo-redundant storage (GRS) is the default and recommended replication option. GRS replicates your data to a secondary region (hundreds of miles away from the primary location of the source data). GRS costs more than LRS, but GRS provides a higher level of durability for your data, even if there's a regional outage.
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) replicates your data in availability zones, guaranteeing data residency and resiliency in the same region. ZRS has no downtime. So your critical workloads that require data residency, and must have no downtime, can be backed up in ZRS.
Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com
The Azure Storage platform is Microsoft's cloud storage solution for modern data storage scenarios. Core storage services offer a massively scalable object store for data objects, disk storage for Azure virtual machines (VMs), a file system service for the cloud, a messaging store for reliable messaging, and a NoSQL store. The services are:
Core storage services
The Azure Storage platform includes the following data services:
Example scenarios
The following table compares Files, Blobs, Disks, Queues, and Tables, and shows example scenarios for each.
| Description | When to use |
|---|---|
| Azure Files: Offers fully managed cloud file shares that you can access from anywhere via the industry standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. You can mount Azure file shares from cloud or on-premises deployments of Windows, Linux, and macOS. | You want to "lift and shift" an application to the cloud that already uses the native file system APIs to share data between it and other applications running in Azure. You want to replace or supplement on-premises file servers or NAS devices. You want to store development and debugging tools that need to be accessed from many virtual machines. |
| Azure Blobs: Allows unstructured data to be stored and accessed at a massive scale in block blobs. | You want your application to support streaming and random access scenarios. You want to be able to access application data from anywhere. |
| Azure Disks: Allows data to be persistently stored and accessed from an attached virtual hard disk. | You want to "lift and shift" applications that use native file system APIs to read and write data to persistent disks. You want to store data that is not required to be accessed from outside the virtual machine to which the disk is attached. |
| Azure Queues: Allows for asynchronous message queueing between application components. | You want to decouple application components and use asynchronous messaging to communicate between them. |
| Azure Tables: Allow you to store structured NoSQL data in the cloud, providing a key/attribute store with a schemaless design. | You want to store flexible datasets like user data for web applications, address books, device information, or other types of metadata your service requires. |
References: https://docs.microsoft.com
Azure Storage redundancy
Azure Storage always stores multiple copies of your data so that it is protected from planned and unplanned events, including transient hardware failures, network or power outages, and massive natural disasters.
Redundancy in the primary region
Data in an Azure Storage account is always replicated three times in the primary region. Azure Storage offers two options for how your data is replicated in the primary region:
Locally redundant storage (LRS) copies your data synchronously three times within a single physical location in the primary region. LRS is the least expensive replication option, but is not recommended for applications requiring high availability.
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) copies your data synchronously across three Azure availability zones in the primary region. For applications requiring high availability, Microsoft recommends using ZRS in the primary region, and also replicating to a secondary region.
Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com
This tutorial describes how to use Traffic Manager to create a highly responsive website by directing user traffic to the website with the lowest latency. Typically, the datacenter with the lowest latency is the one that is closest in geographic distance.
Steps to follow for this purpose:
Create two Virtual network (one in East-Us and other in India)
Now Create two VM in each vnet.
Install IIS in both the VM. Create Index.html file within wwwroot folder in both VM.
Now create two more VM in both Vnet (one in each) for testing the website.
Now configure the DNS name in both VM server. (vmserver-eastUS, vmserver-india)
I provided the name vmserverus.eastus.cloudapp.azure.com in configuration. Same way create DNS for India server also.
Now create traffic manager profile. This time select Routing method as 'Performance'.
Now all steps are completed. This is the time for testing.
Go to testing server of US and open the above url in IE. You will see web page from US server. same try to do with India testing server you will see data from India server.
Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer. This service allows you to distribute traffic to your public facing applications across the global Azure regions. Traffic Manager also provides your public endpoints with high availability and quick responsiveness.
Traffic Manager uses DNS to direct the client requests to the appropriate service endpoint based on a traffic-routing method. Traffic manager also provides health monitoring for every endpoint. The endpoint can be any Internet-facing service hosted inside or outside of Azure.
Traffic Manager routing methods
Azure Traffic Manager supports six traffic-routing methods to determine how to route network traffic to the various service endpoints. For any profile, Traffic Manager applies the traffic-routing method associated to it to each DNS query it receives. The traffic-routing method determines which endpoint is returned in the DNS response.
The following traffic routing methods are available in Traffic Manager:
All Traffic Manager profiles have health monitoring and automatic failover of endpoints. Within a Traffic Manager profile, you can only configure one traffic routing method at a time. You can select a different traffic routing method for your profile at any time. Your changes will be applied within a minute without any downtime.
Here we will test a demo on priority basis.
First create two web app in two different region.
Create a traffic manager profile with below information.
Now create endpoint inside traffic manager.
First we need to add primary end point. then we will create failover end point.
