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Deploying and Managing Scalable, Cloud-Based Infrastructure in Azure

This blog post is located over here; Managing Scalable Azure Infrastructure 

 

Here are my notes while the above portfolio is being restored; I...accidentally deleted it while mass cleaning out my Drive and didn't realize for a week. Oops. If anyone has a contact at Google who would like to help, I'm on LinkedIn.

 They're messy, but the gold shines through.

In Summary (Load Balancing and maintenance);

I created two azure load balancers for web app redundancy and speed; this eliminates single points of failure. Health probes let me know if something needs attention. 

Distributes web traffic across multiple virtual machines, making it resilient + scalable, maintain performance, and eliminate single points of failure.


A health probe makes sure everything is up and operational, and LB rules distribute HTTP traffic.


Hands-on experience configuring 2 azure load balancers, a tool that, at it’s base basicness, has multiple components that ensure uptime, optimize web traffic, and improve application reliability.


Optimized web traffic and ensured application uptime and reliability by configuring 2 azure load balancers and health probes across multiple service regions that maintain performance by eliminating single points of failure. 


Testing Load Balancers

In Summary - 

After I set up the LBs, I tested load balancers in two regions to ensure uptime and redundancy [by stopping and starting virtual machines [simulated a failure] to watch the data carry over to the other machine]

 

Ensure IPs are static.


Configuring static IP addresses for the load balancers. Other devices like laptops or phones do not have static IPs because of [lot of jargon/reasons you could pay me to go into], but we want our load balancer VMs to be firm and in place.


Also, less admin overhead for us.


We want scalable and fault tolerate infrastructure! Dynamic IPs means our LB VMs aren’t secure.


 

First, what is Internet Information Services?

It’s a Microsoft Web Server tool to serve HTML (web) pages. If you’ve never heard of it, nor me until I did this. 


I install it onto a VM using the Powershell command so we don’t expose the virtual machine to the greater internet unnecessarily. It's more secure this way!

 

What happens to make sure if one aspect goes down? We need redundancy (The irony of me typing this, this entire post, because I accidentally deleted my Google Site where the original information is.)

 

 We use Blob Replication;

  • Between storage accounts (and I guess those storage accounts can cross regions if they’re attached to it. 

  • Updates in primary storage are copied to secondary account

  • Supports disaster recovery, fault tolerance, and content synch

  • If you replicate it, if something goes down, then it’s somewhere else

 Also ties in with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) - it delivers the assets to the visitor.

 

I then mapped CNAME and URL records to the proper URL (Again, the irony is not lost on me, as I did that 10 minutes before writing this post as I accidentally deleted my Google Site where the original information is from both Sites and Trash!)

 

Resiliency

What is an Availability Set (AS)?

Availability Sets are logical groupings of VMs in different fault domains to prevent something taking out all of them at once, and thus, your web app.

Basically, redundancy.

I created...


What is Internet Information Services? (IIS)

It’s a Microsoft Web Server tool to serve HTML (web) pages. If you’ve never heard of it, nor me until I did this. 

Storage with Azure Blob

What is Azure Blob Storage?

A tool to hold unstructured data.

An important thing I did here was set the storage to anon access; But why?

Imagine if you sold clothing online. People want to see what they buy. Running an authentication conversation between services each time to load an image would make the process slow and uninviting. People will go elsewhere (Bounce rate). 

Blob storage with anon access in the appropriate region means images load quickly to the end user.

Blob Replication copies the unstructured data in one blob to another. This way, the images in the US-West region are also copied to the storage in the US-East region! It support disaster recovery and replication. Think of it as backup.


I Automated content synchronization between storage accounts on opposite coasts - that's less time spent manually checking consistency while supporting disaster recovery and fault tolerance.

Azure Front Door and Content Delivery

What is Azure Front Door (FD)?

Front Door distributes the content, not the VM, to improve latency, durability, and lower storage costs 

I made a profile for FD; That consists of configuring a


Then I attached it to a Fully Qualified Domain Name;


Fun fact: You can buy top- level domains through Azure. This one connected to a GoDaddy domain.


Strengthened fault tolerance resilience by dynamically redirecting image traffic in case of a regional outage. 


Using Azure Traffic Manager to Manage the Flow of Traffic

Azure Traffic Manager points visitors in the direction of VM's that aren't overloaded, making visiting an app a quicker process.

In summary, I 

 

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