A little confused about Azure

Question

I've been reading about azures storage system, and worker roles and web roles.

Do you HAVE to develop an application specifically for azure with this? It looks like you can remote desktop into azure and setup an application in IIS like you normally can on a windows server, right? I'm a little confused because they read like you need to develop an azure specific application.

Looking to move to the cloud, but I don't want to have to rework my application for it.

Thanks for any clarification.

Answer 1

There are several elements to think about here -

Code wise - to a large degree this is 'just' .net running on IIS and Windows, so everything is very familiar and all the past learnings, best-practices, etc. apply.

On top of that you may want to leverage some Azure specific capabilities - for example table storage, or queues, or interacting with your deployment - for which you might need to learn a few more APIs, but these aren't big, and are well thought of and kept quite simple, so there's not a bit learning curve. good architecture, of course, would look to abstract these away to prevent/reduce lock-in, but that's a design choice.

Outside the code, however, there's a bit more to think about - You'd like to think about your deployment - because RDP-ing into a machine and making changes that way takes away many of the benefits of PaaS - namely the ability of the platform to 'self-heal' by automatically re-deploying your application should a server fail. You would also like to think about monitoring - which would need to be done slightly differently.

Last - cloud enables different scenarios, and provides a scale-out model rather than a scale-up model, which you might want to take advantage of, but it might require doing things a little bit.

So - bottom line - yes - you could probably get an application in Azure very quickly, without really having learning much or anything, but to do things properly, and to really gain from the platform, you'd like to learn a bit more about it. good thing is - it's not much, and it all feels very familiar, just another 'framework' for .net (and Java, amongst others....)

Answer 2

You can just build a pretty vanilla web application with a SQL backend and get it to work on Azure with minimal Azure dependencies. This application will then be pretty portable to another server or cloud platform.

But like you have seen, there are a number of Azure specific features. But these are generally optional and you can do without them, although in building highly scalable sites they are useful.

Azure is a platform, so under normal circumstances you should not need to remote desktop in fiddle with stuff. RDP is really just for use in desperate debugging situations.

Answer 3

Changes to the ASP.NET application are minimal (for the most part the web application will just work in Azure) But you don't remote connect to deploy. You actually build a package (zip) with a manifest (xml) which has information about how to deploy your app, and you give it to Azure. In turn, Azure will take care of allocating servers and deploying your app.