Category: Articles

Website Development Case Studies #1- Tailwind Traders

Throughout the Web Development learning paths, we’ll work with Tailwind Traders , a fictitious home improvement retailer. It operates retail hardware stores across the globe and online.

Tailwind Traders currently manages an on-premises datacenter that hosts the company’s retail website. The datacenter also stores all of the data and streaming video for its applications. The IT department is currently responsible for all of the management tasks for its computing hardware and software. For example, let’s suppose that you work as an IT specialist for the company’s IT department. Your IT team handles the procurement process to buy new hardware, installs and configures software, and deploys everything throughout the datacenter.

These management responsibilities create some obstacles for delivering your applications to your users in a timely fashion. As an IT pro, you realize it would be advantageous to have hosting servers, storage, databases, and other services immediately available when you develop and deploy applications. You want to easily start a new server or add services to your solutions.

In the other units of this learning module, you’ve learned about some of the cloud-based services that Tailwind Traders can use to address its technology challenges. With that in mind, the services that are available through Azure can help Tailwind Traders conduct its business more efficiently.

As you complete the various modules in the Azure Fundamentals learning paths, we’ll analyze the challenges that Tailwind Traders is facing. You’ll see how you can use Azure services to address each of the issues as they arise. After you’ve completed each of the modules, the knowledge that you gained from resolving the hypothetical challenges that the fictional Tailwind Traders company encountered should benefit you in your real-world environments.

What is Azure Sentinel?

Azure Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM system that a security operations team can use to:

  • Get security insights across the enterprise by collecting data from virtually any source.
  • Detect and investigate threats quickly by using built-in machine learning and Microsoft threat intelligence.
  • Automate threat responses by using playbooks and by integrating Azure Logic Apps.

Unlike with traditional SIEM solutions, to run Azure Sentinel, you don’t need to install any servers either on-premises or in the cloud. Azure Sentinel is a service that you deploy in Azure. You can get up and running with Sentinel in just a few minutes in the Azure portal.

Azure Sentinel is tightly integrated with other cloud services. Not only can you quickly ingest logs, but you can also use other cloud services natively (for example, authorization and automation).

Azure Sentinel helps you enable end-to-end security operations including collection, detection, investigation, and response.

How to Access Azure Hosting Batch account using the .NET client library

In the previous unit, you created Azure hosting  Cloud Batch and Azure Storage accounts. Then you uploaded FFmpeg as an application so that Batch jobs can use it for their tasks. Let’s review our scenario once more.

You’d like to automate the process of converting MP4 video files into animated GIFs. To do this, you create an app that can upload video files for conversion, start the conversion in parallel across all the uploaded files, monitor the progress, and finally download the results.

In this unit, we’ll look at Azure hosting Batch client libraries we can use to access the Batch and Storage accounts we created in the preceding exercise.

Azure hosting client libraries

There are two NuGet packages you’ll need to import into your app. The first is the Azure hosting Batch client library, Microsoft.Azure.Batch. You’ll use this library to create and delete Azure hosting  Batch Pools, create and delete workload jobs, create and delete tasks, and monitor running tasks.

The next library we’ll use in the solution is the Azure Storage client library, Microsoft.Azure.Storage.Blob, which allows you to connect to, and manage, files in an Azure hosting Storage account. You’ll use this library to manage the files in the Blob storage container. The app will scan the folder for all the uploaded videos, and gives access to the job to write out the tasks converted videos.

The Azure hosting Batch Management library, Microsoft.Azure.Management.Batch, is a third library that isn’t needed for your app because you manually created the Batch and Storage accounts.

We’ll add the NuGet packages we need with the dotnet add package command.

Typical usage pattern

Using the above libraries a typical approach to setting up a batch process is:

  1. Create Batch Service account (Batch Management API)
  2. Create a Storage account (Storage API)
  3. Create a Blob client to manage file processing (Storage API)
  4. Upload files to process (Storage API)
  5. Create a pool of compute nodes (Batch API)
  6. Create a job to run on those nodes (Batch API)
  7. Add a task to the job to run (Batch API)
  8. Monitor the tasks progress (Batch API)
  9. Download processed files when finished (Storage API)
  10. Delete the input storage container, delete the pool, delete the job (Batch API & Storage API)

Azure web hosting Batch Pools

A powerful feature of Azure web hosting Batch is how it manages compute resources. By defining pools of resources, Azure Batch has the flexibility to be set to a specific number of nodes. This is a good option if the size of the processing is well-defined and there’s a requirement to have a known fixed cost. The other option is to allow the pool to scale up or down automatically based on a formula you define. This can take into account fluctuations in demand, and allow an application to scale to meet that demand. This also has the added benefit of keeping the costs as low as possible.

When creating Azure web hosting Batch pools, you specify a number of attributes:

  • Target number of nodes (default limit 100)
  • The node’s operating system and version (a range of Windows and Linux images are available)
  • Type of node, dedicated or low-priority (dedicated nodes are more expensive but wont be preempted, low-priotity nodes are cheaper as they take advantage of surplus capacity in a region, but could have their tasks suspended if the resources are required elsewhere)
  • The nodes performance as size of CPU, memory, and storage
  • Auto-scaling policy (scaling is controlled by a formula you specify, for example based on the percentage of CPU in use)
  • Task scheduling policy (control the maximum number of tasks a node can run in parallel, and choose how tasks are distributed between nodes)
  • Start up tasks to be performed when nodes boot (used to set up the node to be able to run the tasks, like installing required applications)
  • Network configuration (subnet and VNet options)
  • Application packages (allow applications to be easily deployed to every node in a pool)