esell / azure-stages

Helping you deal with the various stages of Azure adoption. We're all friends here

The stages of Azure adoption

One does not simply "go to Azure" with an existing application, it is usually done in multiple stages that develop as the users become more familiar with Azure.

In this repo I have created a set of exercises that mimic what you might see in the real world with regards to the stages. Each stage will build on the previous one, utilizing more Azure native services, as well as showing how you can re-factor an existing application to really take advantage of all that the cloud can offer.

We will be using a toy application called pastemaster. This is a VERY simple application that acts as a pastebin type page. Users can create "pastes" of text and share them with other users via a unique URL. The pastemaster app consists of a few simple HTML pages (aka the frontend), a Go application to handle the business logic and a MySQL database for the data store. Sounds like a typical three-tier app eh?

Pre-flight

First, this is not an official Microsoft project and is certainly not official Microsoft documentation. These are not "best practices" and when in doubt, you should refer to the official Azure documentation.

Moving forward I will assume you are on a *nix type system. There are helper scripts in this repo that are written for bash and will not work on Windows. You can (and are encouraged) however to do everything inside of the Windows Subsystem for Linux :).

Another option is the Azure Cloud Shell which is a great way to play around without polluting your system.

I am also going to assume that you have the Azure CLI installed and are at least somewhat familiar with how it works and/or the concept around it.

Stage 1

When enterprises begin their journey into the world of Azure, they typically do it in "phases" or what we are calling stages. Typically the first stage will be to lift & shift the existing application into Azure as-is. This is just what it sounds like, picking up the app from wherever it is and then re-creating it one-for-one up in Azure.

Stage 1 will demonstrate how you can improve on the basic lift & shift by taking advantage of some of the features Azure has to offer. We will try to simulate, at a very basic level, what that process might look like with our toy pastemaster application.

Stage 2

PaaS services are one of the areas that users can benefit from when using Azure. Now that our app is up and running on VMs, we are going to swap out the MySQL VM for a Azure Database for MySQL PaaS instance. This will be our first baby step into a "cloud native" architecture and will pave the way for our future stages.

Stage 3

While we are on the PaaS train, let's setup Azure Key Vault to help us later on when we start deploying our app all over the globe!

Stage 4

Multi-region active/active

Stage 5

Autoscale?