Morgan Lucas | RUN TCP/IP - Deploying and Managing Azure Infrastucture

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Using Azure to Deploy and Manage Cloud Infrastructure

By Morgan Lucas

Older posts are here.

I am going along with the course here on Udemy by Thomas Mitchell; It has labs I'm going through and working through.

I will be skipping ahead in this recap, I know how to set up virtual machines (doing it via the GUI in this course was actually a refresher, as I usually use Terraform).

This was going to be two parts, but no.

Glossary:

Virtual Machine (VM): A computer hosted in the cloud.

Other terms will be described in-line.

Deploying Azure Bastion

What is Azure Bastion?

It's a service that allows you to connect securely over SSL over a private IP address.

I Deployed;

A secure, central, and remote access solution using Azure Bastion to establish private connectivity between virtual networks via peering (basically, your private networks can talk to each other securely and you can reach one outside of the network securely via browser).

Load Balancers

What is Load Balancing?

Load Balancers distribute traffic over multiple VMs so you don’t cause an outage by having only one do the work. Enhances scalability and fault tolerance - add more VMs if you like.

I created...

Health probes to monitor the VMs and make sure they’re up.

Rules to define how the traffic is distributed between front and back end resources.

In summary;

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.

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...

Availability sets attached to VMs in US-West that were added to load balancers
Network Interface Card (NIC) Network Security Group
Inbound security rule on port 80.
Installed Internet Information Services remotely thanks to Azure Bastion above

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.

In Summary, I ;

Built a backend with Windows Server 2019 to provide load balancing scalability and redundancy in 2 US Regions.
Installed IIS to allow webcontent to be served to users by using the RUN command in Powershell instead of directly configuring it, minimizing the attack surface to connect.
Allowed webcontent to be served using Windows IIS

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.

In summary, I;

Automated content synchronization between storage accounts on opposite coasts, minimizing 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

Endpoint
Origin type host name
Catching and compression
Query String

Then I attached it to a Fully Qualified Domain Name;

Azure DNS zone
Name server records
Custom domain name to Content Delivery
CNAME record (which propagates to naming agencies)
Verify DNS

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

In summary, I;

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

Created a profile
Configured performance based routing
Regional endpoints
Custom DNS integration to allow access through company's branded URL
Set up health checks

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