Azure Resource Manager: The Future of Cloud Services

Question

I am currently working heavily in Azure. I am actually quite fond of ARM (Azure Resource Manager) right now and would love to keep using it. Right now in the old portal, We have a lot of resources tied up as Cloud Services. Now, I know cloud services are available in the new portal, but it seems that Microsoft is moving away from the classic cloud service model. Can someone explain if this is true? If so, what will the new model look like? I already use resources groups to manage Websites (WebApps), so I assume this is where the azure future lies. Will we see the "deprecation" of cloud services on down the line?

I am trying to understand if I need to begin re-structuring my Azure Infrastructure.

Any insight, explanation, or documentation is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I asked a question about the future of Cloud Services on the recent Azure Compute AMA. You can read the answers directly on Reddit for all details, below are a few interesting quotes (emphasis mine).

On ARM Integration for Cloud Services:

We are looking at ways to make the transition to ARM easier for Cloud Service customers- one of those options includes CS integration in ARM. This investigation is in the very early stages though, so if you are looking for a solution soon, check out VMSS/ACS/SF/Web Apps (meagan-msft)

And:

I think it's safe to say that if we make any significant investment in CS in the near future, it would be ARM integration, and as Meagan suggests, that's still in planning. Beyond that, there are no major feature improvements on the horizon. We believe the platform is pretty mature at this point. (seanmichaelmckenna)

So it doesn't look like any major innovations will hit Cloud Services soon, however:

Cloud Services are not going anywhere. In fact, many Microsoft services run on Cloud Services, so we heavily rely on them as well. They are fully supported, so feel free to continue to use them. (meagan-msft)

For those who want to switch to a different Compute service, these recommendations were made:

However, if you would like to check out other services that are integrated with ARM today, we recommend checking out the following:

• Web Apps for customers who want a fully managed platform and are building traditional web applications
• Service Fabric for customers who want an opinionated application platform and managed infrastructure, but still need some control over the IAAS layer
• VM Scale Sets for customers who need IaaS-level control with easy scaling, autoscale and load balancer integration

Azure Container service was also listed as a potential alternative.
Some things to consider (my understanding):

• Service Fabric currently (2017) requires at least 5 VM instances, except for dev/test purposes. So probably only an option for larger services
• VM Scale Sets is an IaaS offering, i.e. you have to manage OS updates etc. yourself. However, support for automatic OS updates is being worked on.

Answer 2

Still no direction from the Azure Advisers group other than officially they will not drop support for Cloud Services. I think they are nearing giving us some kind of direction but I can't say anymore than that.

Answer 3

Personally I can't see a place for cloud services in the new ARM world of Azure. I have always found them a convoluted concept that simply added complexity to a deployment.

In the ARM view of deployments servers are collected together in a VNet, and each server is attached to a Nic which in turn can be connected to the internet. A security group then takes care of ingress / egress rules.

This is a much cleaner deployment method, as it puts connectivity configuration at the server layer instead of mapping them all through a higher layer of abstraction.

I don't see the place of cloud services in ARM, however after a quick search it seems that there is a plan to implement it

Answer 4

So there are two things here - Cloud Services and managemenet of Cloud Services.

When you manage Cloud Services in current portal the underlying mechanism used is Azure Service Management (ASM) where as it is Azure Resource Manager (ARM) in the preview portal. To me, ARM is the new way of managing your Cloud resources in Azure (including Cloud Services).

I don't work for Microsoft so I would not know if Cloud Services themselves will be deprecated down the road or not but one thing I think will happen is that ASM will be deprecated in favor of ARM. At some point of time, the only option you will be left with managing your cloud resources will be through Azure Resource Manager. One example that makes me believe this thing is the presence of Classic resource providers (e.g. Classic Storage Resource Provider which enables you to manage storage accounts created in current portal via ASM in the preview portal which works exclusively on ARM).