A .NET Software Developer’s Top 6 Favorite Microsoft Azure Technologies
As a software developer I like continuous learning and to learn by doing. I love learning more about new modern technogies available. It is important to me to keep in track of the new developer technologies that are useful and interesting.
I personally think it is exciting to learn more about Microsoft Azure technologies. Of course, there are other big cloud providers in the market these days. However, Azure technologies suit me best as I do software development in Microsoft C# and in .NET / .NET Core. Currently, they are supporting more and more programming languages and integrations.
The Microsoft Azure cloud platform have a lot of great cloud services that are really fascinating and interesting. I am amazed how these cloud technologies can help solve technical and real-life problems.
I wish I could select all of them but here are my to 6 favorite Azure cloud services.
Azure App Service
As a PaaS (Platform as a Service), Azure App Service is one of the most practical and popular service used in most application development in the cloud. I really like creating and developing any apps in any programming language and platform that I want in my favorite IDE like Microsoft Visual Studio or VS Code.
Develop, code it, and you are ready you publish it to an Azure App Service where you have all you need in one place — on the Azure Portal! You can even use Azure Cloudshell and other supported command line tools to do all you want from VS Code. From development to management, to the logging analytics of the applications.
I like that this service gives the option to auto scale, Application Insights to monitor the performance, and do a lot of cool stuff that are useful — for example the Deployment Slots in Azure App Service that is really cool! If you haven’t tried it, check it out!
Azure Service Bus
I had an Azure Tech talk about Azure Service Bus at Azure User Group Manila. I mentioned and shared about it as one of my favorite Azure technologies along with my Filipina Azure Developer friends. I even did a technical overview about it. This technology is pretty great in solving complex messaging problems with different great features like message sessions, auto delete on idle, dead letter queue and more. It is worth checking if you having having queue problems you need to solve.
Azure Service Bus solves complex messaging problems that many developers have to solve. We aim to develop quality and reliable cloud messaging solutions in our applications. The service Service Bus guarantees reliability, scalability, and security in messaging delivery. Send and receive reliable asynchronous messages or data that you can scale and secure. — Azure Service Bus, A Technical Overview
I actually have simple example codes in GitHub about different types of Azure Service Bus Queues and Topic — it’s example sender and receive on a console app.
Azure Functions + Azure Durable Functions
Serverless computing and its technologies are pretty great if you want to pay only for what you use without worrying about deployments and the infrastructure management. Actually it is not really “serverless”. There is actually an infrastructure behind it. What makes it serverless is that you don’t need to care about the server administration because Microsoft Azure takes care of that for you. You just need to pay for what you use on your Azure Functions.
Serverless Compute Service like Azure Functions enhanced developer productivity too so it is a win-win. Azure Functions are event-driven and are trigged by events such as HTTP triggers, data store events, timers and more. You can also integrate Azure Functions with other Azure services and third party services.
Azure Durable Functions are the extension and enhanced version of Azure Functions. It is special because it stateful unlike normal Azure Functions. Having stateful serverless functions can be cost-effective if you have long-running task to do.
There different types for Durable Functions — the client, the orchestrator and the activity. You can code stateful workflows by writing functions using the orchestrator and stateful entities by writing entity functions. For more information about Azure Durable Functions.
Durable Functions have several patters like Function Chaining, Fan-In/Fan-Out, Human Interaction, Monitoring and more.
You can check out my simple example for function chaining on my GitHub repo for it below.
https://github.com/jonahandersson/AzureDurableFunctions_Simple_Example
Azure Virtual Machines
Azure Virtual Machine is completely the other world and opposite Azure Functions and Durable Functions which is a Serverless/FaaS.
If you want to have all control over your infrastructure or if you need to migrate existing applications without the need of doing too much modernization, then Azure Virtual Machine is ideal. You can deploy one or many of your favorite image or choice directly on Azure Portal or programmatically deploy via Azure CLI, Powershell or ARM templates.
Azure VM Managed Instances allow multiple virtual machines.
I had a talk about Azure Virtual Machines that you can check out https://youtu.be/Ym1hzEfgoWE
Azure Key Vault
If you want to securely keep all your secrets, keys and certificates for your applications then Azure Key Vault is perfect!
Centralizing storage of application secrets in Azure Key Vault allows you to control their distribution. Key Vault greatly reduces the chances that secrets may be accidentally leaked. When using Key Vault, application developers no longer need to store security information in their application. Not having to store security information in applications eliminates the need to make this information part of the code. For example, an application may need to connect to a database. Instead of storing the connection string in the app’s code, you can store it securely in Key Vault.
Next time you need to way to save all your important info, use key vault in Azure!
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps is the last of this list but definitely one of the best and innovative cloud services that Microsoft Azure has! I like that this Azure suite for organizations and project management combining DevOps services in one place. Developers and IT operations can collaborate together in one place! You have the option to save your repositories, create CI/CD with Azure Pipelines, create project management processes with Azure Boards, create different kind of tests in Azure Tests and create artifacts with Azure Artifacts.
Plan smarter, collaborate better, and ship faster with a set of modern dev services.
So these are my top 6 favorite Azure Services but this list could have definitely long since I have more than 6 favorites! 😊
About Author: Jonah Andersson is a Filipina-Swedish Software Developer who codes full stack system development in C# .NET/NET Core. Jonah is passionate about continuous learning, developing and sharing knowledge about Microsoft Azure cloud technologies. She one of the #AzureHeroes in Sweden. A woman who codes in tech who likes writing, advocating gender equality in the tech industry through mentorship and by being role model on her spare time. Follow her on Twitter @cjkodare, LinkedIn and her website at https://jonahandersson.tech
