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Azure Deployment Best Practices in 2024

Team Hypershift · April 5, 2024

What Cloud Migrations Are Supported by Azure?

When deploying applications and data within Azure, organizations must consider which platform model best meets their business needs.

  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) allows organizations to scale up and scale out their Azure instance to meet changing business needs, helping manage computing and virtual machine resource expenses.

  • Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is part of the IaaS model, along with additional tools for database management and business analytics.

  • Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) includes IaaS and PaaS and an application in the service offering.

After choosing a preferred platform model, the next step is the cloud migration strategy:

  • Rehosting: Leverages a direct copy of existing application and infrastructure to the new Azure instance. This method is a low-risk option for cloud migration.

  • Re-architecting: An optimal method for cloud migration where organizations re-architect their applications and infrastructures to leverage cloud capabilities and functions.

How Critical is Security and Compliance within the Azure Cloud Environment?

Microsoft Azure provides tools to protect data, applications, and infrastructure. Azure security capabilities allow organizations to deploy adaptive control needed to meet compliance and regulatory mandates.

These controls include:

  • Azure Identity and Access Management supports multi-factor authentication (MFA), role-based access control (RBAC), and least privilege assigned to individual or active directory groups.

  • Azure supports data security and encryption for data-at-rest and data-in-transit with AES-256 encryption.

  • Azure Information Protection provides email encryption.

  • Azure Rights Management Systems helps organizations protect intellectual property by applying tags and document labels, monitoring content access and usage for high-risk compromises.

  • Threat Management capabilities protect cloud services and virtual machines from malware and DDoS attacks and provide data analysis tools and vulnerability scanning.

  • Azure Compliance provides a dashboard with real-time visibility into compliance status against several mandates and regulations, including PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and HIPAA.

What is Azure Deployment Environments?

Azure Deployment Environments (ADE) offer project-based templates for developers to deploy consistent environments at any development stage, maximizing security and cost efficiency.

  • ADE is available across Australia East, Europe West, Japan East, Canada Central, UK South, US East, US East 2, US South Central, and US West 3 East.

  • ADEs are easy to create and deploy new environments without the hassle of backend processes. Platform engineers can choose from pre-built templates and spin up self-service environments quickly, with all configurations applied automatically.

What is Azure Kubernetes Services?

Deploying Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) applications can be complex but efficient with proper planning and execution. Organizations have different deployment options regarding AKS:

  • Canary: Allows for the slow rolling out of updates to a small group before releasing them to everyone.

  • Rolling Deployment: Updates an application to a new version without downtime by updating instances one at a time until all are on the latest version.

  • Blue/Green: Maintains two identical production instances. One environment is primary, and the other is idle.

  • A/B: Also called split testing, involves testing two versions of an app on a small group of users. The better-performing version is then used for everyone.

Managing the Cost of Azure Cloud

Organizations consuming Azure cloud resources must maintain cloud cost monitoring. These resource expenditures are subject to constant fluctuation, so enabling the Azure Cost Management Module is necessary.

Recommendations to help manage your Azure investment:

  • Right-size underutilized resources using Azure Advisor.

  • Change your dynamic workflow from a fixed hourly to a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

  • Move reserve instances to a pay-as-you-go model instead of a one-year committed contract.

  • Organizations must enable auto-scaling to help spin up and spin down resources.

  • Ensure you enable the correct Azure Compute Service offering that aligns with your needs.

What are the Benefits for Organizations Who Migrate to Azure?

Migration to the Cloud is widespread in the IT industry because of digital transformation. Azure Cloud is a top choice for many organizations looking to migrate.

Azure delivers several benefits to clients, including:

  • Leveraging Azure's scale-up and out elasticity, including Azure App Services and Azure Kubernetes services, to help manage containers and resources.

  • Leverage Azure Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platforms, including Azure SQL database, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Storage.

  • Azure encryption for data-at-rest and data-in-transit leveraging Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).

  • Enable monitoring and logging services for all applications, databases, and virtual machines. These tools help measure performance and overall health.

After each migration to Azure, organizations should consider the following repeatable work to help with future projects:

  • Assess: Assessments are crucial in Azure migration projects. These assessments identify on-premises resources that should migrate to the cloud.

  • Migration: Migration involves moving workloads from on-premises to Azure after assessment and planning.

  • Optimize: Validate your migration plan in a staging environment to ensure it works correctly before deploying to production.

How Can Hypershift Assist Your Organization for an Azure Project?

Moving to Azure is a rewarding yet very complex migration. A massive advantage of Azure cloud migration is transforming the organization's critical applications and data into a more agile, optimal, and secure architecture.

Organizations have an excellent opportunity to retire or re-engineer older applications, remove standalone security devices that serve little or no use in the cloud, and open up the ability to scale up their platforms based on need.

Legacy change control procedures and platform additions in traditional onsite data centers proved costly, disruptive, and often led to more unforeseen issues. Migrating to Azure can reduce the risk of application breaches while providing a more flexible development environment for product expansion and scaling.

Hypershift Transform: Team collaboration is critical in creating a comprehensive cloud strategy. Consulting services provide interactive sessions to help you explore public cloud features and capabilities.

Hypershift Migrate: Help to maximize the cloud for your business success by migrating workloads smoothly.

Hypershift Optimize: Optimize your cloud environment for cost, security, and performance.