A standalone virtual machine is a simple solution for a small application that does not require high availability. By using the Virtual Machine and Virtual Network services, an application can be deployed to a Windows machine, a Linux machine or quickly start from one of the 100s of images available through the Azure Marketplace. A Virtual Machine can be scaled up from a single core VM with 1.75GB of RAM up to a 32 core VM using the latest processors and 448GB of RAM. Common single-machine workloads include a web server, a database server or dev/test environments.
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Many applications will eventually require more than a single VM for either scalability, availability, security or manageability reasons. By deploying a multi-tier application it can be scaled to provide higher availability or increased performance. By scaling to multiple tiers each application tier can then be independently sized to the best VM size for the tier. A common configuration is a front-end web server, such as Nginix, Apache, or IIS, and a backend database server, such as SQL Server, Oracle, or MySQL. For high performance requirements, you can deploy faster disks on Premium Storage. Use security groups to control access to the various tiers and resources.
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Application tiers are typically configured to enable scale-out to multiple VMs in the tier. This scale-out pattern will typically provide higher-availability and performance by leveraging the load balancer service or a storage queue. To enable automatic increase or decrease of the number of virtual machines in the tier the Azure Autoscale service can be used to control the number of virtual machines using a broad range of metrics from the machines or by monitoring communication mechanism such as a storage queue.
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Production applications must have first class monitoring and management practices to ensure efficient operations. Both simple and complex applications can be monitored using the Azure Diagnostics extension and the Azure Portal to track specific performance counters. You can also take advantage of monitoring services offered by the platform, like Application Insights or Operational Insights. Then to protect against the unexpected or unplanned events, Azure Backup can provide secure backups of VMs using inexpensive Azure storage directly through the Microsoft Azure classic portal experience.
Many applications need to integrate with data sources from an on-premises system or authenticate to Active Directory running in your local datacenter. These applications can connect to the on-premises data through a Virtual Network with a Virtual Gateway, securing the connection using a VPN over the internet. Or for higher performance the Virtual network can be connected to the ExpressRoute service offering extremely fast and dedicated lines using dozens of Telco providers.
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