Introduction

Think about the first time you heard the term cloud computing a few years ago (or longer). There are accounts and reports as far back as 2006 of the term being used to describe some of the larger virtualization initiatives for companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. If you search for more tangible evidence, you can find a report dated 1996 from the offices of Compaq Computer, where a group of technology executives who were intrigued by the future of Internet business published a report titled “Cloud Computing.” Fast-forward 20 years into the future to learn about cloud computing services.

The discussions in this book should help you understand the need to improve your organization’s maturity to support a formal cloud strategy that includes broad deployment options to support applications, infrastructure, and networking extensions. In addition to using cloud computing as another business-support initiative, corporations need to create new policies in support of cloud computing’s greater security compliance to more easily enable line-of-business applications.

Thought leaders in many companies read the industry researcher reports from Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and others that show the growth from traditional datacenters to include cloud computing. They present different statistics and timelines, but they all agree that the IT industry and businesses are migrating to the cloud. Workloads drive business; and enterprise customers that review IT spending are realizing the technology efficiencies and automation of cloud-enablement.

Decision makers including CIOs, CTOs, and IT managers are using cloud-based IT to become agile and efficient in responding to business requests made by the CEOs and CFOs. Azure is a global cloud service; it is engineered to build on current IT skill sets using ITIL best practices in support of SMBs and enterprises with traditional constraints that prevent IT from achieving better alignment to the business. Cloud computing enables any size IT department to quickly respond with solutions for business to reach consumers with products and services in a global market.

What This Book Covers

This book provides deep insight into cloud services offered today by Microsoft Azure. It should help IT administrators, IT architects, business decision makers (BDMs), and small and large business leadership teams to quickly evaluate the cloud services available in Azure to improve their IT agility. In these chapters, you discover how this public cloud provider uses commodity computing to allow your business to extend into these readily available services.

This book is different than many books on cloud computing in that it follows two main themes: typical business problems that many companies face and that have cloud solutions, and step-by-step examples that help IT and technical team members to evaluate Azure services quickly. A few other publications provide insight into specific Azure topics, but this book provides a well-rounded understanding of a broad array of Azure cloud services to support you as you connect the dots to achieve IT agility.

Each section presents several key topics. These topics help you fully understand the Microsoft Azure services discussed and how to implement the features. This book is designed to assist you by using the following methods:

• Using a conversational style that helps to raise questions about features and answer those questions, including focused, step-by-step exercises to help you achieve deeper understanding
• Providing information with detailed explanations to help fill knowledge gaps as you continue to expand your learning about cloud computing
• Creating a foundation around cloud services that helps you move traditional IT to a cloud computing approach that provide solutions to “what if” scenarios

How to Use This Book

Although the book and the exercises in each chapter can be used independently, you are not required to read from beginning to end. The four parts group topics in a way that can make learning easier, but the exercises in the individual chapters stand as independent guides for you to follow.

The chapters of the book are organized into four sections. Part 1 is useful for anyone new to the Azure Cloud Services platform and is necessary reading if you want an overview of Azure’s capabilities. The chapters are as follows:

1. “Microsoft Azure and Cloud Computing”: Business discussions specific to growth today and tomorrow
2. “Overview of Microsoft Azure Services”: A high-level look at Azure services and their value to both businesses and IT
3. “Azure Real-World Scenarios”: How large and small businesses use Azure to solve problems for their companies and IT
4. “Planning Your Azure Deployment”: Considerations for extending the traditional datacenter model to a cloud platform

   Part 2 is a fast-moving section that provides a fast ramp-up for IT pros:

5. “Getting Started with Azure Web Apps”: Easily building web sites while using features like auto-scaling (up and down)
6. “Getting Started with Azure Virtual Machines”: Templates to use, including Linux, Windows, Oracle, SQL, MySQL, and your own customized versions
7. “Understanding Azure Storage and Databases”: BLOB storage, how to create storage services, and how to secure access to these services

   Part 3 bridges the gap between traditional datacenters and cloud services. You learn about the networking extensions needed to securely communicate with cloud properties:

8. “Extending Your Network with Azure”: Virtual private networks that extend networks securely into Azure
9. “Identity Management with Azure Active Directory”: How Azure Active Directory creates accounts, providing access for cloud services
10. “Extending Azure Active Directory”: Controlling authentication from on-premises while allowing single sign-on for more than 2,500 cloud apps such as Salesforce, Google Apps, WebEx, and Twitter, and customizing your own applications
11. “Clusters, Regional VNets, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery”: Features you can use to create solutions that are highly available while using Azure Site Recovery to back up VMware
12. “Migrating Your Virtual Machines to Azure”: Using PowerShell to copy your VMs to Azure, convert VMDK to VHD, and create templates from your customized images
13. “Monitoring and Reporting”: Azure services that provide real-time monitors for applications, services, and VMs with enterprise reporting features

    Part 4 covers Azure services that may seem futuristic but give today’s businesses analytic insight via the first cloud-based machine learning service. You develop the agility to use cloud-enabled Hadoop, to securely manage mobile devices while supporting partner collaboration through documents without the loss of intellectual property, and more:

14. “Microsoft Azure Machine Learning”: Predictive cloud-based analytics using the R development language, Python, and drag-and-drop capabilities
15. “Data Management and BI with HDInsight”: Hadoop services in Azure to scale in the support of volume, velocity, and verity of data
16. “Working with Intune and RMS”: Azure services that support managing Apple, Android, and Microsoft mobile devices and tablets and use digital certificates to protect documents

Hardware and Software Requirements

The requirements to connect and use all Microsoft Azure cloud services from the Azure Portal are very broad, to better support the diversity of companies, IT administrators, network administrators, and developers. The Azure Portal can be accessed and managed through many supported browsers, including these:

• Safari (version 7 or the latest for best security)
• Chrome (latest version for best security)
• Firefox (latest version for best security)
• Edge (Windows 10 with the latest security updates)
• Internet Explorer (Version 11 or higher with the latest security updates)

The Azure Portal runs well on modern hardware for most PCs, Macs, and tablet devices. Although mobile phones and their browsers may connect, they currently are not supported by Microsoft Premier Services. The minimum PC hardware recommendations are as follows:

• Processor, 1GHz or faster
• 2GB RAM (4GB or more recommended for PC)
• 64GB hard disk (or higher for PC)
• Network connection (wired or wireless)

To complete some of the more advanced exercises, you are required to use a Microsoft Windows operating system (OS) that supports PowerShell 5.0 (or higher). PowerShell 5.0 is included in Windows 10 and can be installed as a free upgrade from Windows 8.1. An additional free Azure PowerShell module is required to complete all the advanced exercises.

This book does not provide in-depth exercises that require Visual Studio Online, Visual Studio 2013, or Visual Studio 2015 for development. We encourage you to sign up for a free trial subscription or use your MSDN subscription for development and search Apress.com for Microsoft Azure development titles. The Azure APIs support a large number of development languages, including Java, Ruby, .NET, PHP, Node.js, and Python, just to name a few.

Who This Book Is For

The book’s intended audience includes IT professionals such as IT administrators, IT architects, IT support staff, and business systems integration team members as well as TCP/IP networking professionals. The chapters are written to help novice IT admins ramp up, with feature discussions and expert guidance using specific exercises. The content supports an audience that includes business administrators or developers interested in enabling IT agility by extending your on-premises datacenter into cloud services. Our intended readers are interested in gaining deeper insight to add greater levels of service availability and investigate disaster recovery (DR) solutions for VMware and Hyper-V virtual environments, including enterprise DR for physical servers that need to support business continuity.

This book is also intended for business personnel responsible for IT budget planning and IT executives investigating ways to lower operating costs such as life-cycle hardware replacement, increasing datacenter power and cooling costs, and recurring costs for datacenter security audits. In addition, it’s for anyone interested in Azure cloud computing—it is a great reference if you require more detail before you invest and begin integrating your business using Azure cloud services.