Introduction
Microsoft Azure offers several options for hosting your web-based applications, and it is difficult to choose the best option for your scenario. It might look easy to just take the simplest way of moving your infrastructure to Azure in an IaaS way, but this is probably not the best option. There is no single silver bullet option that is always best. In this article, we will discuss the various options to consider when you choose to move your web workloads to the cloud.
Figure 1 shows a flowchart that could help you decide which flavor fits your application. This flow chart focuses on several questions that we will elaborate on in the following section. Please consider that it is impossible to take all possible questions and scenarios into consideration in this flowchart, so use it as a rule of thumb. The questions described below are some of the main considerations you should take into account when choosing your cloud web infrastructure.
Cloud Agnostic?
Microsoft Azure offers a lot of specific Platform as a Service features – for example App Service – that remove the effort of managing your infrastructure. When you choose a solution that is specific to Azure, it can become more difficult to make a switch to other cloud providers in the future. The choice is therefore between development speed combined with tighter coupling with Azure, or more overhead in managing your environments, which gives you more control over where you host your application. Typically, you’re fine with just choosing one cloud solution provider, but sometimes regulations, uptime requirements or a specific application architecture require that you use multiple providers to host your applications.
Containerizing applications?
Being able to host your applications using container technology such as Docker gives you a lot of flexibility and options. Microsoft is making working with containers better each day by adding support for developing applications in both Azure and Visual Studio. Containers can run anywhere on any cloud platform or on-premise, making it a very viable option for both new and existing applications. Tools such as Image2Docker (https://xpir.it/xprt-right-cloud1 ) make it easier to convert existing applications to Docker containers, so even legacy applications can be hosted using container technology.
Highly unpredictable and flexible workloads?
This question focuses on the usage of your jobs or APIs. In most scenarios, the workload on your APIs will be distributed quite evenly. When your workloads are very unpredictable or they tend to increase at certain moments while at other times there is no load at all (for example monthly batch calculations), specific solutions make a better fit than others. In Serverless options such as Azure Functions, you only pay for the actual use of the executed code, making it ideal for scenarios like this.
Interacting with on-premise / hybrid cloud scenarios?
Some hosting solutions cannot be added to a VNet in Azure, making it a lot harder to securely connect these options to resources that are not hosted on Azure. This is something to consider when building applications that should live in a hybrid cloud scenario where you connect a cloud solution to on-premise services or databases. Azure has made flavors for most of these options that include VNet support. For instance, for App Service they have created the “App Service Environment” option. However, setting this up is more expensive and requires more work compared to the normal App Service.
IAAS
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is an instantly available computing resource. It is provisioned and managed for you by the Cloud vendor. It enables full customizing of the VM after the initial provisioning. But because it is only a managed VM, you are responsible for keeping the VM healthy, which means that patching and security hardening are the user’s responsibility.
Pros
- Lift and shift – a way of working you are already familiar with
- Easy to move between cloud providers
- Can host any technology, Windows, Linux, any webserver technology
- Familiar way of working for most IT departments
- Complete freedom of workload
Cons
- You are still responsible for a lot of management yourself, e.g., patching OS and maintaining configuration
- Often not cheaper than non-cloud hosting
- Not very effective usage of hardware
Azure App Service
Azure App Service is the Platform-as-a-Service offering from Microsoft. It allows for rapid deployment of your applications in a wide range of languages and frameworks. It allows for rapid scaling and a fast setup time, from local development to Azure Cloud production in 10 minutes.
Pros
- Easy to set up and get going.
- Fully managed infrastructure. Only focus on the web application itself
- A lot of supported programming languages: NET, Java, Node.js, PHP and Python.
- Easy to scale up or out
Cons
- No VNet support for secure connections to on-premise from Azure
- Directly exposed to the internet. No direct control over inbound and outbound traffic
App Service Environment
The App Service Environment offers a completely isolated Platform-as-a-Service hosting environment. It allows you to host your web workloads in a dedicated environment. The most important feature from a customer perspective is that it allows deployments into a customer-defined Virtual Network. Because an App Service Environment is deployed into a VNet, customers have finely grained control over both inbound and outbound application network traffic, as well as connecting to on-premise resources using VPN or express-route.
Pros
- Isolated environment
- Deployed in a customer’s virtual network
- Fine control over inbound and outbound traffic to your apps
- The ILB (Internal Load Balancer) ASE offers the option to use your own application gateway and firewall to expose your applications to the outside world
Cons
- ASE adds complexity during the initial roll out
- Costly option if you don’t have a lot of applications
- High startup costs.
Containers in App Service
The Containers in App Service offers the option to deploy Linux-based Docker containers in the App Service model. It offers all the benefits of App Service, but with the added benefit that it enables you to use the standardized Docker format to deploy your application.
Pros
- No management of infrastructure
- Use the familiar Docker format to deploy
Cons
- No VNet isolation
- Only Linux-based deployments (PHP, NodeJS, ASP.NET Core)
Azure Container Services
Azure Container Services (ACS) enable the rapid deployment of a container hosting environment using open source tools. At the moment these consist of Kubernetes, DC/OS and Docker Swarm. ACS allows you to deploy your complex applications as containers using both Windows and Linux as the base OS. Because it is a container-based solution, it is technology-agnostic as well as cloud-agnostic.
Pros
- Lots of different orchestrators to choose from
- Multi Cloud solutions are viable
- Technology stack independent
Cons
- You still have to manage infrastructure with OS / security updates
Service Fabric
Service Fabric is also an orchestrator on the Azure platform like ACS. But it also offers an SDK that describes how applications should be written. There is a choice between reliable services and an Actor Model. It also allows for guest executables to run inside Service fabric. Microsoft is also working on bringing Docker Container support to Service Fabric. Microsoft Service Fabric is not Azure only, you can install it on-premise as well as in other clouds.
Pros
- Stateful services are provided out of the box using the Service Fabric SDK
- Can run anywhere
Cons
- Higher startup costs compared to other container orchestrators.
Serverless
Serverless technology is the most cloud-native option in the list. Azure Functions and Logic Apps were made to offer you the things you expect from the cloud. In Azure Functions, you build a piece of code that is a single function with some input parameters and some outputs. Then this single function is uploaded to Azure and it will run from there. There are almost no operations involved and there are several triggers to start your function, ranging from HTTP triggers to timer triggers, to triggers that act on changes in table storage. Azure will automatically scale your function so it can run in parallel in order to quickly execute batch jobs or just single events, and the best part is that you only pay for each time the function runs.
Pros
- Pay for what you use
- Large set of triggers to start jobs
- No infrastructure to manage
- Easiest operation model
Cons
- Not made for hosting web applications, only focused on APIs and jobs
- No VNet support
Conclusion
As you can see, there are several options to host your web workload on Azure. We believe the days of IaaS are numbered, because in almost all scenarios PaaS or container options are superior. Microsoft is heavily investing in these areas in comparison with IaaS. Please note that the flowchart we created for this article is just a general rule of thumb. There can be other factors that may be important in your specific use case when deciding which solution fits your application. It is a good practice to keep the infrastructure in mind when designing your software architecture. Modern software architectures such as microservices are flexible in the way you host them and can fit in the cloud infrastructure solution you choose to implement. This also allows you to start small and simple, and adapt while you your application or load increases in size.
This article is part of XPRT. magazine.