Enterprise Application Migration To Azure

The Azure cloud is moving fast in so many areas. Understandably, migration tools that can assist and automate the process of migrating applications to Azure are of great importance in order to encourage a move away from existing infrastructure.

Two such tools that I’ve discovered recently are the Web Apps Migration Assistant, which is detailed here, and the Data Migration Assistant, detailed here.

The Web Apps Migration Assistant will analyse your hosted IIS (and even Linux) web apps, and can migrate them (if compatible) to the Azure App Service as Web Apps.

The Data Migration Assistant targets SQL Servers and analyses them for migration to Azure SQL Database. This tool does not perform the migration, instead it highlights the incompatibilities that exist and suggests remedial action, this could include preparing fixes as Transact-SQL scripts. Tools such as SSMS or SQLPackage.exe can be used to migrate the database to Azure, a good overview of this process is here and a deeper discussion of the process is mentioned in this SQL CAT blog. Of course, you may want to determine if your database is even suitable for running in Azure and tools exist such as this one to help size the database prior to migration.

These two tools could help fast-track your move to the cloud, and whilst some effort will still be required, they remove much of the manual effort that was previously required in shifting your applications and databases to Azure.

Microsoft Azure: Differentiating IaaS, PaaS and Cloud Services

I recently realised that there can be some confusion over how an Azure "Cloud Service" can be interpreted in the as-a-service world we now live in.

When you create a VM in the Azure classic deployment model, they are added to a cloud service. A cloud service “acts as a container and provides a unique public DNS name, a public IP address, and a set of endpoints to access the virtual machine over the Internet”.

A VM in this sense can be considered IaaS, the VM being a server in Azure that you have complete control over. The VM just happens to sit in a container called a “cloud service”.

However, you can also create a “Cloud Service” in Azure which results in something different to the above. An Azure Cloud Service consists of 2 components, config files and application files which together result in Web or Worker roles being spun up to execute an application. These roles are effectively VMs, a Web Role is an Azure VM pre-configured to run IIS and worker roles carry out other processing tasks. A Cloud Service in this sense is PaaS, as Azure is managing the VMs for you and you only have limited control over them.