Azure Service Bus Topic

 Azure Service Bus Topic follows the ‘publish and subscribe‘ model. The topic is almost similar to the queue, but it has an independent subscription associated with it. Service Bus Topic ensures a one-to-many form of communication. When messages processes in the Topic, they get copied to each independent subscription. A subscription helps set the filter rules for receiving a message from the topic.

Topic Benefits

Apart from all the benefits offered by the queue, Topic ensures competing consumer, Load Balancing, and Loose Coupling.

Steps to create Azure Service Bus

Prerequisites: You will be required with the Azure Services subscription plan. You can also create a free account valid for one month.

Step 1) Log in to Azure Portal.🚀

Step 2) On the top left corner of the Page, you will see the ‘Create a Resource‘ option, select it and then select ‘Integration‘ to take you to the ‘Service Bus‘ option.

Step 3) To commence the Azure Service Bus facilities, create a unique namespace. The namespace acts as a container to communicate with Service Bus in an application.

A dialogue box will appear with the name ‘Create Namespace’ where you will specify the name of the namespace, Subscription, Resource group, Location, and Pricing Tier.

After filling in all the details, click on the ‘Create’ button.

The different types of pricing tier offered are shown in the image below. You have to keep in mind that you won’t be able to create a Topic with the Basic tier. A Standard/ Premium tier is mandatory to proceed further for Topics.

Step 4) After clicking on the ‘Create‘ button in the above step, deployment gets initiated. It takes several minutes to deploy the resource. Click on ‘Go to Resource‘ to proceed for Service Bus creation.

Step 5) The successful deployment of the service bus namespace can be verified when the following homepage appears. Azure Service Bus provides two entities: Queue and Topic (refer to the image below).

Here we will create both entities, i.e. Queue and Topic.

First, we will “Create a Queue.”

Step 6) From the created Service Bus Namespace (k21ServiceBus, in this case) page, select ‘Queue’ from the navigational menu, then select ‘+ Queue‘ to create the queue.

Step 7) On the Create Queue page, specify the queue’s name, check for the green right tick mark, then click on ‘Create’. The default values get filled automatically.

Step 8) Under the Queue page, we will see the created queue.

Now, we will look at how to create a Topic.

Step 9) From the created Service Bus Namespace (k21ServiceBus, in this case) page, select ‘Topics’ from the navigational menu, select ‘+ Topic’ to create the topic.

Step 10) On the Create Topic page, specify the topic’s name, then click on ‘Create‘. The default values get filled automatically.

Step 11) Under the Topics page, we will see the created topic.

Step 12) Topic includes the additional step of creating a subscription. The subscription option come under the page named Service Bus Topic. (1) – Select the ‘Subscription’ from the navigation menu, and click on (2) ‘+Subscription’.

Step 13) The ‘Create subscription‘ page will appear, specify the details and click on ‘Create’, the subscription will be created.

Step 14) Connection Strings are required to connect and provide information to the application to communicate with the Azure Storage Account.

To get connection String for Service Bus namespace. Under the ‘All resource’, click on the namespace you created. Select Shared access policies. Select RootManageSharedAccessKey.

Step 15) Under the RootManageSharedAccessKey page, you will see the primary and secondary key with the primary and secondary connection string. Copy the key and string for later use.

Azure Service Bus Queue

 Service Queue works on First In, First Out (FIFO) model. The communication between the application occurs via a broker, i.e. Queue. The message sender sends the message to this intermediary (queue), then these messages are then pulled from the queue by the Message Receiver. Message sender doesn’t wait for the confirmation from the receiver; it keeps on processing messages as the queue delivers the message to the receiver in the same order as added to the Queue.

Queue helps when one needs to communicate between web app and Azure application. Further, on-premise cloud and hybrid solution’s hosted apps can make a connection with each other. In addition to that, distributed application’s components can communicate with various organisation.

Queue Benefits

Queue helps in achieving the application scalability and ensure resilience to the application architecture. The load-levelling feature helps the receiver and the sender convey messages at different rates. Application components decoupling is achieved with the queue, which means the sender and the receiver need not communicate simultaneously.

Overview of Azure

 Azure is the name of the cloud computing service owned by Microsoft that provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (Paas) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Azure’s cloud computing services are network, storage, compute, database, analytics, security, and many more. In this blog, we will only focus on the basics of network services.

What Is Azure Virtual Network?

An Azure Virtual Network (VNet) may be a network or environment which will be wont to run VMs and applications within the cloud.
When it’s created, the services and Virtual Machines within the Azure network interact securely with one another.

Advantages of Using Azure Virtual Network

Some of the foremost advantages of using Microsoft Azure VNet are as follows:

• It provides an isolated environment for your applications
• A subnet in a very VNet can access the general public internet by default
• We can easily direct traffic from resources
• It is a highly secure network
• It has high network connectivity
• It builds sophisticated network topologies in a very simple manner

Moving on, let’s have a glance at the components of Azure VNet.

Elements of Azure Virtual Network

Azure networking components provide a large range of functionalities that may help companies build efficient cloud applications that meet their requirements.

The components of Azure Networking are listed below, and we have explained each of those components in an exceedingly detailed manner:

1. Subnets
2. Routing
3. Network Security Groups

Subnets

Subnets let users segment the virtual network into one or more sub-networks.
These sub-networks may be separated logically, and every subnet consists of a server.
We can further divide a subnet into two types:

1. Private – Instances can access the web with NAT (Network Address Translation) gateway that’s present within the public subnet.
2. Public – Instances can directly access the net.

Routing

• It delivers the information by choosing an appropriate path from source to destination.
• For each subnet, the virtual network automatically routes traffic and creates a routing table.

Network Security Groups

• It is a firewall that protects the virtual machine by limiting network traffic.
• It restricts inbound and outbound network traffic depending upon the destination IP addresses, port, and protocol.

How to Launch an Instance using Azure VNet?

• First, create a virtual network within the Azure cloud
• Next, create subnets into each virtual network
• Now, assign each subnet with the respective instance or Virtual Machine
• After which you’ll connect the instance to a relevant Network Security Group
• Finally, configure the properties within the network security and set policies
• As a result, you’ll be able to launch your instance on Azure

Moving forward, we’ll see an indication on creating an Azure virtual machine and virtual network step-by-step.

Demo: Step-By-Step Demo of Creating Azure Virtual Machine and Virtual Network

Step 1 − First, log into your Azure Management Portal, select ‘New’ at the underside left corner.

Step 2 − Next, on the Network Services visit Virtual Network -> Quick create.

Step 3 – Now, enter the name and leave all other fields empty and click on ‘next’.

Step 4 − Finally, click on ‘Create a Virtual Network,’ and it’s done.

Note: Now, within the same VNet, create a Virtual machine

Step 5 – First, select ‘create’ to create a replacement Virtual Machine with Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter.

Step 6 – Once the fields are entered, select the present resource group that you just had created for the virtual network and choose OK.

Step 7 – Now, choose a desired size and configuration by selecting DS1_V2 Standard type
Note: By default, we might choose a Virtual Network.

Step 8 – Now select the subnet as FrontEndSubnet and don’t change the general public IP address. Also, keep the Network Security Group as none.

Step 9 – Create a brand new availability set and set a replacement name thereto.

Next, set the fault domains as 2 and so disable the Guest OS Diagnosis section.

Step 10 – Finally, click and choose ‘create’.

Congratulations, you’ve got successfully created a VM.

This is all the fundamental information you wish to grasp about Microsoft Azure Virtual Network.

Create an Azure Front Door

 In this guide, Azure Front Door pools two instances of a web application that run in different Azure regions. You create a Front Door configuration based on equal-weighted and same priority backends. This configuration directs traffic to the nearest site that runs the application.

Azure Front Door continuously monitors the web application. The service provides automatic failover to the next available site when the nearest site is unavailable.

Create an Application Gateway

 In this guide, you will use the Azure portal to create an application gateway. Then you test it to make sure it works correctly. The application gateway directs application web traffic to specific resources in a backend pool. You assign listeners to ports, create rules, and add resources to a backend pool.

Protecting Hyper-V VMs by using Azure Site Recovery

 In this guide, you will learn how to set up disaster recovery of on-premises Hyper-V VMs to Azure, Select your replication source and target, Enable replication for a VM. The Azure Site Recovery service contributes to your disaster-recovery strategy by managing and orchestrating replication, failover, and failback of on-premises machines and Azure virtual machines (VMs).

Implementing and Configuring Azure Storage File and Blob Services

 In this guide, you will see how to implement and configure Azure storage services Blob and File share. The Azure Storage platform is Microsoft’s cloud storage solution for modern data storage scenarios. Core storage services offer a massively scalable object store for data objects, disk storage for Azure virtual machines (VMs), a file system service for the cloud, a messaging store for reliable messaging, and a NoSQL store.

• Azure Blobs: A massively scalable object store for text and binary data. This is ideal when you have storage solutions for file, videos, log files and images

• Azure Files: Microsoft Azure File storage is a type of Azure service that was designed to support the needs of the Azure VM environment.

Implementing Highly Available Azure IaaS Compute Architecture

 In this guide, you will see building solutions for high availability using Availability Zones. High availability refers to a set of technologies that minimize IT disruptions by providing business continuity of IT services through redundant, fault-tolerant, or failover-protected components inside the same data centre. In our case, the data center resides within one Azure region.

Implementing an Azure App Service Web App with a Staging Slot

 In this guide, you will learn how to create a deployment slot as a staging environment in App Service.

Implementing user-assigned managed identities for Azure resources

 

What Is Azure Traffic Manager?

Azure Traffic Manager allows you to regulate the distribution of user traffic by using DNS to direct requests to the most appropriate service endpoint supported on a traffic-routing method and therefore the health of the endpoints.

Azure traffic manager selects an endpoint based on the configured routing method. It supports a variety of traffic-routing methods to suit different application needs. After the selection of endpoints, the client is connected directly to the appropriate service point. It also provides endpoint health checks and automatic failover. It also enables you to build a highly available application that is resilient to failure, including the failure of an entire Azure region.

2. Why Do We Use Traffic Manager?

Traffic Manager uses DNS to direct client requests to the most appropriate service endpoint based on a traffic-routing method and the health of the endpoints. An endpoint is any Internet-facing service hosted inside or outside of Azure. It provides a range of traffic-routing methods and endpoint monitoring options to suit different application needs and automatic failover models. It is resilient to failure, including the failure of an entire Azure region.

3. Azure Traffic Manager Routing Methods

Azure Traffic Manager distributes the traffic based on one of the six traffic-routing methods that determine which endpoint is returned within the DNS response.

These following traffic routing methods which are available:

1.) Priority

When you select the priority routing method, it contains a prioritized list of service endpoints where the primary service endpoint has the highest priority for all traffic. If the primary service endpoint is unavailable, it redirects the traffic to the second priority endpoint and so on.

2.) Weighted

The weighted routing method is used when you want to distribute traffic evenly or to use pre-defined weights across a set of endpoints. In this traffic-routing method, you allocate a weight which is an integer from 1 to 1000, to each endpoint in the Microsoft Azure Traffic Manager profile configuration.

3.) Performance

This traffic routing method is used when you want to improve the responsiveness of many applications by routing traffic to the location that is closest to the user. The ‘closest’ endpoint isn’t necessarily closest as measured by geographic distance. Instead, the ‘Performance’ traffic-routing method determines the closest endpoint by measuring network latency.

4.) Geographic

In Geographic routing, each endpoint associated with that profile must have a set of geographic regions assigned thereto. When a region or a set of regions is assigned to an endpoint, any requests from those regions get routed only thereto endpoint.

5.) Multivalue

You can select MultiValue for Azure Traffic Manager profiles which may only have IPv4/IPv6 addresses as endpoints. When a question is received for this profile, all healthy endpoints are returned.

6.) Subnet

Select the Subnet traffic-routing method to map sets of end-user IP address ranges to a specific endpoint within an Azure Traffic Manager profile. When a request is received, the endpoint returned are getting to be the one mapped for that request’s source IP address.

4. Features Of Azure Traffic Manager

Some of the features are discussed below:

1) Increase application availability

It provides high availability for your critical applications by monitoring your endpoints and delivering automatic failover when an endpoint goes down.

2) Improve application performance

Azure allows you to run cloud services or websites in data centres located all over the world. It enhances application responsiveness by directing traffic to the endpoint with the lowest network latency for the client.

3) Perform service maintenance without downtime

You can perform planned maintenance operations on your applications without downtime. It can direct traffic to alternative endpoints while the unkeep is ongoing.

4) Combine hybrid applications

Microsoft Azure Traffic Manager supports external, non-Azure endpoints enabling it to be used with hybrid cloud and on-premises deployments, including the “burst-to-cloud”, “migrate-to-cloud,” and “failover-to-cloud” scenarios.

5) Distribute traffic for complex deployments

Using nested Azure Traffic Manager profiles, multiple traffic-routing methods are often combined to make sophisticated and versatile rules to scale to the requirements of larger, more complex deployments.

5. Hands-on Of Traffic Manager Profile

Step 1) Log in to Azure Portal (Please make sure you have a subscription before doing all this. If you created a free account for the first time, you’ll already have a FREE TRIAL subscription for 1 month).

If you don’t know how to create an instance or virtual machine then click on Create a Virtual Machine  to know more

Create a Traffic Manager profile that directs user traffic based on endpoint priority

Step 2) On the upper-left side of the screen, select Create a resource > Networking > Traffic Manager profile.

Step 3) In the Create Traffic Manager profile, enter, or select these settings

Name: Enter a unique name for your Traffic Manager profile.

• Routing method: Select Priority.
• Subscription: Select the subscription you want the traffic manager profile applied to.
• Resource group: Select your existing Resource Group or Create new
• Location: This setting refers to the location of the resource group. It has no effect on the Traffic Manager profile that will be deployed globally.

Step 4) Select Create and its done now you have created successfully traffic manager profile on Azure