When designing azure cloud applications, you need different talents and a different attitude than when developing on-premises applications. This is due to the cloud’s vast global size and reliability, as well as services and features not available on-premises. To cope with this new reality, you must reconsider some of your previous skills and learn new ones.
Here are the five most important talents to have when designing cloud software, with a special emphasis on developing applications for hire azure developers .
1. Plan for uncertainty.
Unpredictability? Isn’t the cloud meant to be reliable and accessible? Yes, but you don’t have control over the server on which your application is operating if you want high availability and other cloud benefits. This is when the unpredictability comes into play.
When you execute an application in Azure (for example, on an App Service Web App), it runs on a server in a Microsoft datacenter. Everything, including serverless applications, runs on servers. However, Azure controls the servers and leverages internal services, such as its Service Fabric, to run your application, resulting in a 99.95 percent uptime. When Azure determines that the server hosting your app will fail within the next hour or that your app would be better off operating on a different server for performance reasons, it will shift your app to a different server.
Because you don’t know where your programme is operating, you shouldn’t save and cache data in local memory, the local registry, or the local file system. It’s possible that you scale and can no longer access the files since you’re running on a different server. Instead, use external services for data storage and caching, such as Azure Storage or Azure Redis Cache. This ensures that your data is always accessible, regardless of what happens to your app or the server that hosts it.
2. Create with a cost-benefit analysis in mind.
You just pay for what you use on the cloud (most of the time). There are also many services that run continuously, regardless of whether they are used. In any event, you should keep the prices of your applications in mind. This entails being cognizant of how CPU cycles, memory, storage, and bandwidth are used.
Consider bandwidth.
Consider the following example: You wish to transfer an on-premises SQL Server system to an Azure SQL Database (the Azure equivalent of SQL Server). After altering all of the application connection strings to the new database—including some of the applications that are still operating on-premises—the next step would be to move those to the cloud. You might assume everything is fine until you notice that one of the on-premises programmes copies the entire database to memory every hour to analyse the data.
You pay for exiting data on Azure (outgoing traffic is termed egress; incoming traffic is called ingress), so if you’re not paying attention to bandwidth, you may find yourself with an unexpectedly hefty bill at the end of the month.
Consider performance.
In addition to data, you must be cautious of the CPU and memory that you utilise. When you use an Azure Function, for example, you are charged for the amount of processing time and power required to execute your function (see the details here). This means that if you have a slow function that uses a lot of CPU cycles and memory, you will be charged extra. Especially when millions of them are carried out each month.
Reduce the size of your services and switch them off.
Aside from making your apps more efficient, you can also save money by scaling down your services; you can turn off or scale down VMs when they are not in use. When the load is low, you can scale your App Services to a lower pricing tier and fewer instances. The cloud’s capacity to scale up and scale down is what makes it adaptable and cost effective.
3. Extend your applications
The cloud makes it simple to scale your applications up, down, out, and in, allowing you to easily migrate to a more capable server (scale up) while increasing the number in terms of application instances (scaling out), and vice versa (scale down and in). All of this is possible with the push of a button. Smart individuals have done the hard work so that we no longer need to consider establishing web farms. Now all we have to do is click and drag a slider up and down.
The platform is easily scalable, but does your app? That is all up to you. You must ensure that when you create a new instance of your programme, it continues to execute. This means that you must consider things like state in your application. Where do you keep it (assuming you keep it at all)? What if you want to scale globally? What if you have one instance of your application in the United States and another in Asia? How do you direct your users to the appropriate application instance? Your application must be able to deal with several instances, and you must plan for this.
Azure can assist with difficulties such as global scale. Azure Traffic Manager is a service that may route users to the most performant application instance for them based on their location. More information about how this service works can be found in the Building a Global App with Azure PaaS course.
4. Resize your data
When scaling your apps, you must also scale your data. This is more challenging than scaling your apps since you must consider:
This is more challenging than scaling your apps since you must consider:
- These are difficult difficulties,
- and the solutions are largely based on your circumstances,
- such as who your users are, where they are,
- what type of data you retain, what the company policies and regulations are, and so on.
Azure’s Azure Cosmos DB offering provides some assistance. This allows you to simply duplicate data to different regions and select the level of transactional consistency required. However, if your data isn’t allowed to be saved in every location where you want it to be, this may not be a good option for you.
In that instance, consider sharding your data so that some of it is in one place and some is in another. Azure SQL Elastic Database Pools and the related Elastic Database Tools can be of assistance.
5. Create a pipeline for monitoring and diagnostics.
In the cloud, you’ll frequently find yourself running a slew of various services that comprise your system. Perhaps you’re working with microservices that individually run in a cloud container, communicate with databases, and make use of a security service like Azure Active Directory. Because of the cloud’s loosely connected and distributed structure, it’s tough to gain a solid overview of what’s going on and determine the health of your system.
You must set up a pipeline to monitor your services and, if necessary, diagnose them. Fortunately, Azure takes care of the plumbing. To get a good picture of how things are doing on Azure, use the Azure Monitor service. Each service and piece of infrastructure can be outfitted with a more comprehensive logging mechanism, such as Application Insights for applications and Log Analytics for infrastructure. When you need diagnostics, you can debug your apps in Visual Studio or even in production with the Snapshot Debugger.
Although these services are beneficial, it is your responsibility to integrate all of the applications required to monitor and generate an overview of their health.
