Hands-On Cloud Administration in Azure

Implement, monitor, and manage important Azure services and components including IaaS and PaaS

Mustafa Toroman

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789139778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: System Administration
• Index: Computer Science

Explore Azure services such as networking, virtual machines, web apps, databases, cloud migration, and security

Key Features

• Understand Azure services to build, deploy, and manage workloads on cloud
• Learn in-depth core Azure services and work through real-world scenarios and case studies
• A concise and practical guide for learning cloud administration on Azure

Book Description

Azure continues to dominate the public cloud market and grow rapidly thanks to a number of recent innovations. Azure's wide range of services and support has led to a large number of customers switching to Azure cloud.

Hands-On Cloud Administration in Azure starts with the basics of Azure cloud fundamentals and key concepts of the cloud computing ecosystem and services. Then, you will gradually get acquainted with core services provided by Azure, including Azure VNet, types and assignments of IP addresses, and network security groups. You will also work on creating and administering Azure Virtual Machines, types of virtual machines (VMs), and design VM solutions based on computing workloads. As you make your way through the chapters, you will explore Azure App Service, discover how to host your web apps in Azure, and monitor and troubleshoot them. In the concluding chapters, you will learn more complex and abstract services, such as Azure Storage, Azure Backup, and Azure Site Recovery. You will also get to grips with Azure SQL Databases and the SQL on Azure VM concept.

By the end of this book, you will have obtained practical experience of working with Azure services and Azure administration, along with maintaining, monitoring, and securing your Azure resources.

What you will learn

• Understand the concepts of IaaS and PaaS
• Learn design patterns for Azure solutions
• Design data solutions in Azure
• Explore concepts of hybrid clouds with Azure
• Implement Azure Security in cloud
• Create and manage Azure resources with script-based tools

Who this book is for

Hands-On Cloud Administration in Azure is for system administrators, cloud admins, cloud engineers, and DevOps engineers who are interested in understanding administration-related services in Azure. Prior experience of working with Azure is an added advantage.

Infrastructure as a Service - the First Layer of Cloud Computing

The next step in our cloud journey is to leverage the Azure Virtual Machines offering as part of Azure IaaS. This is the first logical step when moving our workloads to the cloud, as managing Azure Virtual Machines is not much different from managing local VMs. We no longer have access to the virtualization host and hardware, but administrating and managing Azure VMs is no different from administrating and managing local servers or VMs.

We'll show you how to achieve high availability of your services and how to scale out workloads as one of the main benefits that Microsoft Azure offers.

Areas that we'll cover in this chapter are:

• Creating Azure Virtual Machines
• Managing Azure Virtual Machines
• Creating Azure Load Balancers
• Configuring Azure Load Balancers
• Creating Azure Virtual Machines scale sets

Technical requirements

For this chapter, you'll need:

• An Azure subscription

Deploying Azure Virtual Machines

Deployment of any Azure resource can be done in several ways and it's no different with Azure Virtual Machines. We can use the Azure portal, ARM templates, Azure PowerShell, or Azure CLI. We will discuss all these methods but for the time being we'll stick to the Azure portal and occasionally use ARM templates. This is to gain better knowledge of Azure services and what is created in each deployment. Other tools can help us in the long run, especially when we talk redeployment and automation, but we'll get to that part later.

We already did a quick create of an Azure VM, but this time we'll look more closely for options that are available as last time we only considered the Azure networking part as the important one.

Creating a new Azure Virtual Machine

To create a new Azure VM, we need to select New resource and select New Virtual Machine.

The first step is to select the operating system for our VM. There are hundreds of images available to select from both Windows and Linux. It's important to mention that more and more Linux VMs are deployed to Azure daily. Information from the end of 2017 tells us that more than 40% of all Azure Virtual Machines are running Linux, and that percentage is probably up since then.

Supported versions of Windows Server in Azure are:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
• Windows Server 2012
• Windows Server 2012 R2
• Windows Server 2016

For Linux, there are too many versions to name but supported distributions are:

• Ubuntu
• CentOS
• RHEL
• Kali
• Oracle

All images can be selected as a minimum installation or preconfigured with additional software installed. For example, we can select Windows Server 2016 with all settings at default or select an image that has SQL Server installed and ready to use. We can choose the same for Linux, choose minimum installation, or choose an already configured image with software such as Chef, Puppet, Jenkins, and so on.

There is also an option to choose your custom image with the configuration and software of your choosing. This can be an image of your on-premises VM that is uploaded to Azure or an image created from another Azure VM.

After we choose the OS, we start a new blade that will take us through three stages.

Basic Azure Virtual Machine information

The first step is to provide basic information for our VM. A name needs to be provided for any type of resource in Azure. It's useful to give names based on procedures and roles as this will help in later management. It's easier when the name of your VM gives you a hint about what its purpose is. As I intend to use this one as a web server, I'll name it WebSrv1.

VM disk type lets us choose between two values—HDD and SSD. This can be critical for our VM as the disk type can significantly impact performance. As this impacts the price of the VM as well, we need to find a balance and choose based on expected workloads. Choosing HDD may be good enough if we create a web server but if you're going to deploy a database server, SSD is the recommended option.

The Username option doesn't allow us to use most common server usernames such as Admin, Administrator, SysAdmin, and similar. This is in order to protect your cloud resources. As most Azure VMs with a public IP address can be accessed through RDP, it's critical to limit that access as much as possible. I have multiple VMs that are attacked daily and the most common attempts are made using these exact usernames. We can apply additional security to VMs and usernames, but we'll discuss that in later chapters.

Similar to any other resource, we need to provide information for the Subscription, the Resource group, and Location where the VM will be deployed. An example of basic information can be seen in the screenshot shown here:

Azure Virtual Machine sizes

The second step in the Azure Virtual Machine creation blade is to choose the size of your VM. The size of the VM will determine three things—the number of CPUs, the amount of memory, and the type of OS disk. As you choose the type of disk in step one as well, this will narrow down the options that are available. VM sizes have three different pricing tiers:

• Basic
• Standard
• Low priority

Basic-tier VMs are intended for dev/test environments and, even though they have a similar performance to VMs on the standard tier, there are a few limitations. They have lower IOPS than standard-tier VMs and don't support load balancing or auto-scaling.

Standard-tier VMs are intended to be used in a production environment and have better CPUs and IOPS performance.

Low-priority VMs are allocated based on free and unused resources in Azure Datacenter. They come with a lower price but can be unavailable at any time, as Microsoft Azure may claim these resources to satisfy requests with a higher priority. They are intended to be used for batch processing and random jobs.

But the pricing tier isn't the only thing to determine the price of your VM. Each tier has different sizes that provide a certain amount of CPU and memory; a higher amount equals a higher price.

The standard tier has additional categories based on the VM purpose:

• General-purpose
• Compute-optimized
• Memory-optimized
• Storage-optimized
• GPU
• High-performance compute

Most of these are self-explanatory as general-purpose has a balanced CPU-to-memory ratio, compute-optimized has more CPU, memory-optimized has more RAM, and storage-optimized has the best IOPS. GPUs are specialized VMs for heavy graphic rendering and video editing. High-performance VMs have at least eight vCPUs and use DDR4 RAM.

The size of the VM also determines the number of NICs that can be attached to your VM.

This can be from one to eight depending on purpose and size.

Options for selecting the VM size can be seen in the following screenshot:

Advanced VM options

The third blade gives us the option to configure a lot of additional settings. In the previous chapter, we focused only on the networking part, but this time we'll explore these options more closely.

The high availability section gives us two options—Availability zone and Availability set.

The Availability zone determines the zones inside the Azure Datacenter. These zones have an independent power source, networking, and cooling, and p...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Packt Upsell
• Foreword
• Contributors
• Preface
• Key Concepts of Cloud Computing
• Azure Networking - Foundation of Azure IaaS
• Infrastructure as a Service - the First Layer of Cloud Computing
• Azure App Service - Hosting Web Applications without a Server
• The Azure Data Platform
• Azure Storage, Backup, and Site Recovery - Moving your Data to Azure
• Hybrid Cloud with Azure - Extending Local Workloads to the Cloud
• Azure Active Directory - Identity in the Cloud
• Azure Security and Administration
• Best Practices
• Assessments
• Other Books You May Enjoy