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Introduction to Microsoft Azure

Published 20. December 2022 by bjoern

Introduction

Microsoft Azure is an open, flexible, and hybrid cloud platform that enables you to build, deploy, and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides a broad set of integrated tools and services that reduce the time-to-value for new technologies like AI, IoT, edge computing, and blockchain.

What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides flexible cloud services to help you build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers.

As a developer, you can use Microsoft Azure to build, deploy and manage your applications on the internet. The platform is designed to be flexible, reliable, and cost-effective for your business needs with the following benefits:

  • Fast-growing business for Microsoft
  • Offers flexible pricing models based on consumption, such as per second or per gigabyte
  • Provides high availability for critical applications through geo-distribution of data centers around the globe

What services does Microsoft Azure offer?

Microsoft Azure offers several cloud computing, storage, database, and analytics services. These include:

  • Compute services (Azure VMs, Azure App Service)
  • Database as a Service (Azure SQL Database)
  • Storage services (Azure Storage, Azure Files)

How does Microsoft Azure implement availability?

Microsoft Azure has a 99.95% SLA, among the best in the industry. This is achieved by providing cloud services hosted in Microsoft-owned data centers located across the globe. Redundant power and cooling systems protect these data centers and networking infrastructure so that any single factor or event, such as natural disasters or man-made failures, such as power outages or fires, does not impact service availability. Microsoft’s global footprint gives customers confidence that their data will remain available no matter where they are located globally. They can rely on Microsoft’s high availability over an extended period due to its geographically dispersed cloud infrastructure platform (GCP).

Why is Microsoft Azure agile and reliable?

Azure is a cloud computing platform that is flexible and scalable. It’s also reliable, secure, and agile.

Azure offers multiple services to help you build and deploy applications faster with greater agility. Developers can use it to design, build, deploy and manage applications through different stages of their life cycle—from development to production. With Azure Cloud Shell, you can develop on any Windows 10 device, including Surface Hub or desktop PC, without installing anything locally. The consistent user experience across these devices allows you to seamlessly move between your local machine or remote server in the cloud using an SSH connection; for example, there is no need for additional software installations when working from different locations. All features are available at once!

Microsoft Azure has many features that make it an attractive option for businesses.

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides businesses with various features to build applications. It offers security and scalability features, making it an attractive business option.

Azure has many services that can be used to build applications. One service is HDInsight, which helps organizations build machine learning models and run them at scale in the cloud. Organizations can also use Azure SQL Data Warehouse, which helps them run analytics workloads at scale on SQL Server in the cloud or on-premises infrastructure.

Another feature of Azure is reliability and agility: Microsoft uses its internal global network backbone to communicate between data centers and ensure high availability across all regions globally; it also uses geographically distributed storage systems to protect against natural disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes; if one location goes down due to power outage or other issues (e.g., hardware failure), then another will automatically take over so that your sites remain up 24/7 without any downtime whatsoever!

Conclusion

Microsoft Azure provides many features that make it an attractive option for businesses. It offers scalability, security, and robustness to ensure that your data is always available when needed. Microsoft Azure has been used by large and small companies for years, proving itself a reliable service.

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Welcome to your Azure Free Account

Published 27. April 2021 by bjoern

Today it is about the creation of a first Azure account, the Azure Free Account. In one of my last presentations, I was asked, or at our meetups, I am regularly asked what you have to do when creating the Azure Free Account, so here is a little guide. With this little guide, I would like to show you which steps are necessary and which information is requested. So, let’s start by explaining what this Azure Free Account is all about …

Free Ressoucres from Azure which are included in the Azure Free Account

What is included in your Azure Free Account?

Keep it short and simple – you’ll get a lot 😉

  • 200 USD aka 170 Euro for 30 days
    • every service you want to test from the complete range of available services in Azure!
  • 12 months of popular free services like
    • 1x Linux Virtual Machine (B1S) – monthly 750 hours
    • 1x Windows Virtual Machine (B1S) – monthly 750 hours
    • 2x Managed Disks 64GB – P6 SSDs
    • 5GB LRS – Blob Storage
    • 5GB LRS – File Storage
    • 1x Azure SQL Database – 250GB Data (S0 = 10DTU or S1 = 20DTU)
    • 1x Azure Cosmos DB – 25GB Data (400RU/s)
    • 1x Azure Container Registry (Standard Tier)
    • a whole bunch of Cognitive Services like Face Recognition, Anomaly Detector etc
  • Always free
    • 10 Web-, Mobile- or API-Apps
    • 1.000.000 Azure Functions requests
    • Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)
    • Azure DevOps (5 users)
    • Azure Data Factory (5 low-frequency activities)
    • just to name some of them

You can get a full list of those included services => https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/

Let us start to create your Microsoft Account

You should have at least or how Microsoft names it, what you need to sign up:

  • an active Phone Number
  • a credit card
  • and a Github or Microsoft Account Username (earlier known as Live Account)
    If you don’t have such an account you might register one during the process… I also started with a new non-Microsoft mail address which I created for such demos.

On the top of the page, you’ll find a button “Start free” – click it 😉
You’ll be redirected to a login page – if you have a Microsoft Account you might use it here, or you want to use your Github account you have to click at the bottom. If you – like me – want to use a new mail address then you have to start with the”Create one!”-link.

First step in the process of creating your Azure Free Account - Registering your mail address

Type in your mail address and new password, then Microsoft sends you an email to that given mail address in order to vailidate that you are the one and the account is excisting. With that email you’ll receive a code which should be entered on the webpage. (you might be interested in receiving informations from Microsoft – please check the box to get those). After entering the code you need to prove that your are not a robot and have to solve a little riddle – mine was to move a picture clockwise until it is in the correct position and provide your birthday and country/region.

  • Azure Free Account – Enter your password
  • Azure Free Account – Enter the vailidation code
  • Azure Free Account – Solve the riddle
  • Azure Free Account – Enter birthday and location

Now it is time for your first Azure subscription

After creating your Microsoft account we can proceed with connecting this fresh account with your new Azure subscription (a subscription here is a logical header for all your resources – I’ll explain in another blog post.) In this step of your sign in you’ll have to provide a valid credit card and active phone number. Let me explain why this…

  • Credit Card
    is needed for verification that you are old enough (according to the country you come from) and if you might want to change to “Pay-As-You-Go” after your budget is over, then you’re already prepared.
  • PhoneNumber
    also for verification that you are a person and not a robot entering data
  • a Microsoft account
    this is the user with will be registered as your “Global Admin” of your Azure subscription, you have to use it regularly during login if you are not using different accounts for different requests.
  • Entering your profile data
  • Verification with your Phone
  • Checking your Creditcard
  • Done !!!

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me or eventually you will find answers to any offered service within your Azure Free Account => FAQ

In the last image you can see a blue button in the upper left area “Build in the portal” – this is where all the fun for the next weeks will happen – in the Azure portal where you deploy all those great services and administer all your services.
Microsoft offers a lot of easy Step-by-Step scenarios like “Develop and deploy your first scalable Web-App” or “Deploy and Execute a container-based application”

ENJOY and have fun.

Quickstart - Scenarios with Azure Free Account in the Azure portal
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My first virtual machine on Google Cloud

My first virtual machine on Google Cloud

Published 28. March 2021 by bjoern

Today I deployed my first virtual machine in the Google Cloud … in this post, I would like to show the corresponding steps – then in upcoming posts comparing this to AWS and Azure – and thus show the differences later.

So I used my free test account (https://cloud.google.com/free) for the first deployment of a VM in Google, which is available free of charge for three months and only includes certain services in certain forms. My first attempt from the quick start example apparently failed because I was supposed to deploy a VM instance – as described in the instructions – and change the boot device from Debian to Windows Server. The process itself was not the problem, but as it turned out later, this virtual machine could not be deployed because a Windows image is not included in the free account.

But the actual deployment process wasn’t complicated. It was primarily just about creating a virtual machine and connecting to it.

How to start

Here we’re starting via the left menu to the “Compute Service” and continue in the pop-out-menu “VM instances” which appear. If you haven’t created a VM yet, a small dialog box appears. Otherwise, you end up in the overview of the corresponding instances. Here you click on “Create instance,” the following dialog will appear here as well:

  • new VM instance
  • Create a new VM instance from a template
  • new VM instance from machine image
  • Marketplace
Google Cloud - Compute Engine - Overview Virtual Machines

In my case, simply a “new VM instance,” enter the server name above, select the target region, the machine type, or the machine size (vCPU / RAM), and, last but not least, the boot drive with the selection of the corresponding OS image.
(Yes, there are more options, but more on that in another post). If necessary, open the firewall for HTTP or HTTPS traffic.

At the very bottom, you can create the VM instance (or have it created).

Google Cloud - Compute Engine - Creating Virtual Compute Engine

The creation of my test VM with Debian as the operating system went very quickly, and I was now able to connect to the machine via SSH in a browser window, as you can see in the video. The whole process only took a few minutes and was basically very simple and self-explanatory.

If you want to influence specific other settings such as “Administration,” “Security,” or “Networks,” these configuration items are hidden under an “inconspicuous” link below the firewall options.

Google Cloud - Compute Engine - more options for security, network and Maintenance

I will come back to networks in GCP in detail in a later post.

Conclusion:

That was my first attempt to create a virtual server in the Google Cloud (GCP). For me, it was possible without problems and a large number of previous studies, even if the possibility of only creating a Debian and not a Windows machine made me a little sad …

More about my first steps in the Google Cloud in the following articles. 😉

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Azure – What is it ?Microsoft Public Cloud - Azure

Azure – What is it ?

Published 7. January 2021 by bjoern

Azure is the public cloud from Microsoft and was also known as Windows Azure or colloquially Windows Cloud. So in this public platform’s earlier times, there were only “Windows Servers” available to be deployed. At March 2009, Microsoft announced Azure SQL Database as an additional service which customer could deploy.

According to Wikipedia this was the official timeline of Microsofts public cloud (an excerpt):

  • October 2008 – Announced the Windows Azure Platform
  • March 2009 – Announced SQL Azure Relational Database
  • November 2009 – Updated Windows Azure CTP, Enabled full trust, PHP, Java, CDN CTP, and more
  • February 2010 – Windows Platform commercially available
  • December 2011 – Traffic manager, SQL reporting, HPC scheduler
  • June 2012 – Websites, Virtual machines for Windows and Linux, Python SDK, the new portal, locally redundant storage
  • April 2014 – renaming of Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure, and introducing ARM Portal at Build 2014.
  • July 2014 – Machine Learning public preview
  • October 2018 – Microsoft joins the Linux-oriented group Open Invention Network.

More in detail…

Microsoft announces several new services and features throughout the whole year, so it is challenging to name all of those services here, but I think I’ll try to introduce you to a lot of those services and features within this blog. Some in general and some of them with more insight, description, and demonstration of those functioning.

Actually, Microsoft has too many services to name them all, and giving you an overview would take very long, so let me show you a big overview picture.

The Platform Building Blocks - Public Cloud Azure - Services&Features Overview

As you can see from the picture, there are many different services over a lot of different categories for a kind of workload. So you can realize a lot of scenarios for all of your software solutions and application no matter what base it is building. You can deploy a “simple” virtual machine with an SQL Single database that might be filled up by API-calls operated by web-functions. And of course, you can gain insights with several monitoring and alerting functionalities and options like Monitor or Log Analytics. Microsoft will enhance all those services on a regular base not only bug fixes, but a lot of enhancements, new features, new performance level, and nearly all services with a high SLA of 99,9%

I will try to describe many of those solutions and opportunities in each blog post, some more on a basic level, some with more insights and demos.

I hope you will enjoy my blog posts on Azure.

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