1.
Data Opportunities with Azure
Marco Parenzan
Azure Weekly – January 20th, 2015

2.
Marco Parenzan
Training and Speaking with 1nn0va
Microsoft MVP 2014 for Microsoft Azure
Training and planning with ITS Kennedy
www.slideshare.net/marco.parenzan
marco [dot] parenzan [at] libero [dot] it
www.innovazionefvg.net
Developer and Architect in .NET and Web
Cloud Developer
Loves functional programming
Some videogames for fun

3.
Data Legacy WITHOUT Azure
 It’s common having just ONE data store in our toolbox
 Typically it’s a relational database (either Microsoft SQL server or
other SQL vendors)
 Traditional hosting providers had just few combinations of data and
hosting capabilities
 Is Azure just another data (and hosting) opportunity?

4.
Data WITH Azure
 Azure give you many opportunities handling you data
 Not just relational
 Not just small
 Not just monolithic
 Not just table
 Not just fields
 ….

5.
One Scenario
 You have an ASP.NET MVC application
 But ASP.NET WebForms, PHP, Java is the same
 You have a relational DB in SQL Server
 But having a MySQL, Postgre, “Oracle”, is the same

6.
Opportunity
Enhance you SQL-BASED ASP.NET
experience with AZURE

7.
Is Azure just a new hosting opportunity?
Yes, it’s an operational opportunity. You can solve your issues
about
 Deployment
 Security
 Maintenance
 (some) Scalability

8.
Is Azure just a new hosting opportunity?
No, it’s also an architectural opportunity, but only if you write
some code
 Cache your data
 Search your data
 Query your data

9.
Agenda
 Operational opportunities in Azure
 Developer opportunities in Azure

10.
Handle relational data with IaaS: Pro
 Free to choose your OS
 Full power of a Relational DB
 Simple Scaling Up
 “partial” licencing
 Pay Per Use (no CAPEX)
 Full power control
 Ready images (no installation)
 With specific configurations
 Just Click, Name, choose, deploy

11.
Handle relational data with IaaS: Cons
 OPEX: highest
 Relational (non open) DBMS are expensive
 Bits+Management
 You have to be a real Administrator
 Scalability: you can ONLY scale up
 Current sharding needs application to be updated
 Current sharding is in experimentation stage

12.
DEMO
SQL Server in a Azure VM

13.
Handle relational data with SaaS
 You don’t want to handle management issues
 You don’t want vertical scalability-related issues
 You don’t need special infrastructural architecture
 “PaaS if possibile, IaaS if really needed”

14.
Handle relational data with SaaS: Pro
 OPEX: lower than IaaS
 Bits+Management
 Full power of a Relational DB
 Editions
 Clustering
 CPU+Memory
 No licencing (No CAPEX)
 Pay Per Use (OPEX)
 No need for images

15.
Handle relational data with SaaS: Cons
 OPEX: lower, than IaaS
 Partial power of a Relational DB
 Configure what is just available
 Scalability: can ONLY scale up

16.
Migrating your on-premise SQL to SQL Azure
 Not all features of On-Premise SQL are available in SQL Azure
 A “backup” is not enough to bring DB to the cloud
 Exporting a script
 Last December 2014 update have great news
 Some tools are available, updated
 Developer Way: Database Project, targeting SQL Azure
 Operations Way: Database | Tasks | Deploy to Windows Azure SQL Database
 https://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/

17.
DEMO
Migrate your SQL Database to SQL Azure

18.
Host your Web Application in a Azure Web Site
 Publish your Web Application in a Web Sites
 Seconds (minutes) to go
 Configure DB access in web.config

19.
DEMO
Publish your web app to Azure Web Site
in Visual Studio 2013

20.
Stateful web application
 Statefulness is the state that influences the computation of every
request in a web application
 State avoids horizontal scalability
 State is evil, but you have it!

21.
Bring state OUTSIDE your web server
 Redis as an efficient in memory key/value store
 Configure ASP.NET MVC to use Redis (declarative approach)
 Session State is taken OUTSIDE web application
 State can be shared between two or more instances (scaling out!)

22.
DEMO
Configure ASP.NET using REDIS

23.
Latency in a cloud environment is an issue
 In a cloud environment, database is FAR from app hosting
 Query result set can “arrive” long…
 How many times is a query executed? How many times same data
are retrieved?
 In a pay per use environment, queries costs?
 SQL licensing
 Bandwidth

24.
Programming approach to Redis
 Implements a cache-aside pattern
 http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/infographics/cloud-design-patterns/
 Query cache first
 If not found, Query data source and store result in cache
 Cache invalidation rules have to be handled
 Explicit
 Timeout
 Find many .NET clients in nuget
 Example Stack Exchange implementation

25.
DEMO

26.
Search inside your data
 Search on relational DB is tipically “field-oriented” search
 Search in the web is more “context free”, “full text” search
 Handling text is not simple

27.
Azure Search
 A search-as-a-service solution allowing developers to incorporate great
search experiences into applications without managing infrastructure or
needing to become search experts.
 You acquire immediately all text search experience
 You acquire immediately support for languages
 It is based on Elastic Search
 Bullet proof, state of the art, search implementation
 It is independent from a specific data source
 You need to publish your data EXPLICITLY to the search service

28.
DEMO

29.
Latencies with data
 As already told, data is “far” from app
 You can have issues with timeouts
 You have to retry a query

30.
Data that scale out
 You can handle scalability in two ways
 Scale up: increase power of your “hardware” to improve
application responsiveness
 But you cannot avoid programming issues, like “locks”
 Scale out: partition data. Divide data horizontally (by key) to
distribute data between instances.
 Problem: SQL db don’t partition

31.
Entity Framework to the rescue
 All issues can be solved at application level with Entity Framework
(EF6)
 Well, with some help from external code
 Not native implementations
 Not the best solutions in Cloud

32.
DEMO

33.
Conclusions

34.
Recap Operations
 Migrate your DB to SQL Azure
 Or the equivalent DaaS for the RDBMS you like (https://www.cleardb.com/, for
example)
 Use IaaS only if you really (really) need
 Publish your app on Web Site

35.
Developer Recap
 Create a Redis instance
 Configure SessionState if you use Session in ASP.NET
 Implement cache-aside pattern to avoid repeated queries – this is the same for
every db you use
 Create an Azure Search instance
 Enhance your experience in text search!
 Improve EF experience
 Handle retries (in cloud is mandatory)
 Partition your data if you have very big datasets

36.
Conclusions
 Consider Azure as a Platform opportunity for your application
 Consider Azure as a Data Platform opportunity for your application
 You cannot move your application without making improvements
to your architecture
 Make an assessment to check all issues with your legacy chooses
 Evaluate all other data opportunities in Azure

37.
Thank You! - Q&A
Marco Parenzan
Azure Weekly – January 20th, 2015
Email: marco.parenzan@live.it
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/marcoparenzan
GitHub: https://www.gihtub.cob/marcoparenzan
Twitter: http://twitter.com/marco_parenzan