Developers’ Guide to Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is one of the most preferred cloud vendors. However, its immense capabilities may feel overwhelming for amateur developers.

Azure application development skills will boost your career as a developer.

In this article, let’s explore what Microsoft Azure provides you and your enterprise and how to make the most of it. This is a developer’s guide to Microsoft Azure. It will help you to enhance your cloud journey. 

Azure cloud services

Azure Cloud offers services for general use as well as hyper niche. It will be difficult to explore all the Azure cloud offerings. Here is a list of Azure services that developers should consider when Microsoft is their primary computing vendor:

• Azure App Service

All the services have their own individual offering. Azure App Service collates all of them into a more holistic offering. you can utilize this service for

1. deploy a full web application,
2. manage authentication and authorization,
3. storage,
4. monitoring and other features.

Azure App Services is an efficient tool that minimizes the application development cycle. 

Azure App Service is the quickest way to publish all web-based projects. This service streamlines and expands all web applications to help mobile customers. Azure App Service allows you to easily publish consumed REST APIs.

It is a tool that offers authentication by utilizing social providers, & traffic-based autoscaling. Additionally, it also authenticates by using testing in production, & continuous & container-based deployments.

Developers can develop web applications, mobile apps back end, and API applications.

Microsoft designed App Service considering DevOps in mind. It assists multiple publishing and continuous integration deployment tools.

There are online migration tools that can help you to migrate current applications to App Service. You can use Azure App Service when you need a completely-managed hosting platform for web applications.

• Azure Virtual Machines. 

As an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vendor, Azure allows developers to deploy or migrate applications. You can migrate or deploy applications to either Windows or Linux VMs. With Azure VMs, developers can control the machine’s configuration completely.

Developers will be responsible for server software implementation, integration, maintenance, and updating patches. You can use VMs to execute a vast range of server worklfows that do not fit the PaaS model. Microsoft Azure virtual rooms allow you to migrate legacy applications to Azure without changes.

Developers can provision Azure Virtual Machines hosted on Linux and Windows virtual machines. This service is accessible to developers within seconds. It is a perfect fit for advanced applications that do not support containerization.

• Azure Functions (serverless)

Many developers worry about developing and maintaining the entire application or the infrastructure to execute code. You can use Microsoft’s serverless style offering called Azure functions. This Azure cloud service allows developers to write just the code they need. Developers can trigger code execution with the following:

1. HTTP requests,
2. webhooks,
3. cloud service events,
4. or on a schedule.

You have the liberty to draft the code in your preferred development language, like C#, F#, Node.js, Python, or PHP. This Azure service is available on consumption-based billing. Developers need to only pay for the time required to execute the code. Additionally, Azure is a scalable tool that will scale as per your needs.

Developers can use Azure Functions when a code gets triggered. This trigger can be either from any other Azure services, by web-based incidents or on a schedule. It is an effective tool when you don’t need the overhead of a completely hosted project. This Azure service only allows you to pay for the time the code runs.

• Azure Spring Apps

Azure Spring Apps is Another serverless app platform. It allows developers to develop, deploy, scale, and track cloud applications.

You can utilize Spring Cloud to provide modern microservice patterns to Spring Boot applications. Additionally, it will also reduce the boilerplate code to robust Java apps.

Developers must integrate managed versions of Spring Cloud Service Discovery and Config Server. It is crucial to concentrate on developing the business logic. Microsoft takes care of the service runtime with security patches. Furthermore, they also ensure compliance standards and high availability.

Azure Spring apps enable developers to manage the application lifecycle efficiently on top of Azure Kubernetes Service.

It is an effective tool that creates cohesion between your apps and Azure services. The Azure services are Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Cache for Redis.

Developers can track and fix applications using an enterprise-grade unified monitoring platform. It offers valuable insights into application dependencies and operational telemetry.

Azure Spring Apps will reduce operational costs running Spring Boot and Spring Cloud apps.

Core Azure developer tools

Other than the basic application development service, there are multiple Azure tools. These tools can help developers to learn more about Microsoft Azure.

There are multiple different tools developers must be well versed with. Learning different tools is crucial to develop and interacting with apps external to the primary web interface.

Following are the tools that will allow you to use advanced Azure functionality. Additionally, they will also help to overcome the development challenges.

• Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI)

Azure CLI is a command-line interface. This tool effectively works with resources in the Azure environment. The Azure CLI helps to avoid context switching while completing work in a terminal emulator.

• Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a seamlessly integrated development environment with Azure. Yet, this tool has a low overhead. This Azure integration offers a streamlined interface to focus on while developing.

• Infrastructure as code

Most of the big infrastructure-as-code tools are Azure-aware. It is essential to minimize the overhead of deploying services.

Also Read: Developer’s Guide to Software Testing Approaches

• Azure SDKs.

Developers that want more refined control over their cloud application environment can use this tool. Azure offers developer SDKs to give them complete control of their account based on the engineering context required.

• Quickly develop, deploy, and scale the web apps and APIs

Developers need to explore how to utilize Azure App Service within the preferred container frameworks. Additionally, they need to execute it either on Windows or Linux.

• Build cloud-native applications 

Gain the flexibility, accessibility, scalability, and security next-generation applications need with a cloud-native architecture.

Using Azure for development can be overwhelming and challenging. This developer’s guide to Microsoft Azure will help you better understand Azure and its functionalities.