FD Insights Issue 13 | Page 36

Virtual Machines Scenarios B uild a multi-tier, resilient, secure application that can deploy in minutes instead of weeks, that can be managed over the internet, as if it was in another rack in your Datacenter. Starting with the simple VM building blocks, your application can grow into a multi-tier service, scaling to support more users, and move up to becoming a critical business asset for your organisation – using monitoring, backup and site-to-site connectivity. Create a standalone Virtual Machine 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. Deliver a multi-tier application 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. Extend and scale to multiple Virtual Machines Application tiers are typically configured to enable scale-out to multiple VMs in the tier. This scale-out pattern will typical- 34 | www.firstdistribution.co.za ly provide higher-availability and performance by leveraging the load balancer service or a storage queue. Backup, monitor, and manage your application 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. Deploy a hybrid line of business application 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.