Monat: Mai 2020

Deploy to Azure using GitHub Actions from your favorite tools

Enterprises and teams are adopting DevOps technologies combined with people and processes to deliver high-quality code, with faster release cycles and continuous delivery of value, to achieve higher levels of satisfaction for their own customers.

However, it can often get difficult to craft CI/CD pipelines by editing multiple YAMLs to stitch your code to cloud automation workflows. Teams end up spending considerable time and effort setting up and switching between different discrete tools during their day-to-day development cycles.

In November, GitHub Actions for Azure became generally available to automate deploying your app code in GitHub to Azure directly from their repositories. Building on this, at Microsoft Build 2020 we announced that GitHub Actions for Azure are now integrated into Visual Studio Code, Azure CLI, and the Azure Portal simplifying the experience of deploying to Azure from your preferred entry points. Download the new Visual Studio Code extension or install the Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI) extension for GitHub Actions.

GitHub Actions for Azure can now deploy any enterprise application

GitHub Actions gives you the flexibility to build an automated software development lifecycle workflow. To help development teams easily create workflows to build, test, package, release, and deploy to Azure, more than 30 GitHub Actions for Azure are published on GitHub Marketplace, with more planned to roll out in the coming months.

These actions enable deployments to multiple Azure services, from web applications to serverless functions and Kubernetes, as well as Azure SQL and MySQL databases.

We also support Azure login actions that can serve as a generic step that lets customers use scripting for a breadth of Azure resources using Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell. Various utility actions like Azure Key Vault, App Service Settings, and more are also published that help developers target Azure to deploy even their complex enterprise applications while following all the DevOps best practices. Check out the sample application Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock, a multilanguage application built with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, deployed with GitHub Actions and running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Easily get started with Actions for Azure

Various starter templates are made available to deploy your apps created with popular languages and frameworks such as .NET, Node.js, Java, PHP, Ruby, or Python in containers or running on any operating system. To simplify the onboarding experience with deploying web applications, we’ve also included sample repositories which can help you get started in four easy steps:

Fork the sample repository (example, Python sample).
Click on Deploy to Azure in the readme file to create an Azure Web App.
Configure the required GitHub Repo Secrets.
Update the workflow YAML with the Web App configuration and commit the changes.

These steps will trigger your CI/CD workflow to build and deploy an app to Azure using GitHub Actions.

 

Create Action workflows from Visual Studio Code, Azure Portal, or Azure CLI

Today there are millions of developers using Visual Studio Code targeting Azure. Similarly, there are millions of developers on Azure Portal as well. We want to meet Azure developers where they are and provide the best end-to-end developer experiences using all our developer tools. With the new integrations that we’re announcing for Actions into various tool extensions, you can now deploy to Azure effortlessly using GitHub Actions from your favorite tools. This will significantly reduce ramp-up time on GitHub Actions, avoid frequent context switching, and help your teams be more productive with built-in extensions in your favorite tools. We’re excited to announce three new tooling integrations:

In Azure Portal, GitHub Actions has now been added as a build provider in the App Service Deployment Center and Azure Kubernetes Service, making it easier for you to set up CI/CD workflows with GitHub Actions.
 
The Visual Studio Code Deploy to Azure extension helps you set up continuous build and deployment for Azure App Service or Azure Kubernetes Service without leaving the editor.

Azure CLI extension can be installed by running the command az extension add –name deploy-to-azure, and it supports deployments to Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Container Instance via the az aks app up and az container app up commands.

You can use any of these tool integrations to set up an automatically generated and fully customizable CI/CD workflow that’s triggered for every code push. The YAML file is pre-populated with build and release steps, which you can edit as needed. As part of creating the workflow, all the relevant Azure and GitHub repository-related configurations are set up, without you needing to worry about plumbing the two systems.

Get started

Check out the starter templates and the documentation for Deploy to Azure CLI extension, Visual Studio Code extension, and GitHub Actions for Azure to get started. If you have any changes you’d like to see or suggestions for these features, then we’d love your feedback as well as contributions in the respective GitHub repositories–we’re taking pull requests! If you encounter a problem with any specific action, you can also open an issue on the action repository.

Learn more

View more GitHub integrations with Azure to automate your code-to-cloud workflow.
Check out the comprehensive list of GitHub Actions.

Quelle: Azure

Streamlining your image building process with Azure Image Builder

Customizing virtual machine (VM) images to meet security and compliance requirements and achieve faster deployment is a strong need for many enterprises, but most don't enjoy the process and energy needed for determining the right tooling, building the right pipeline, and maintaining it continuously.

We built Azure Image Builder service to make building customized images easy in Azure.

Azure Image Builder service offers unification and simplification for your image building process across Azure and Azure Stack with an automated image building pipeline. Whether you want to build Windows or Linux virtual machine images, you can use existing image security configurations to build compliant images for your organization and patch existing custom images using Linux commands or Windows Update. Azure Image Builder supports images from multiple Linux distributions, Azure Marketplace, and Windows Virtual Desktop environments and you can build images for specialized VM sizes, including creating images for GPU VMs.

After you build the image, you can manage it with Shared Image Gallery and integrate your CI/CD pipeline with Azure Image Builder service. When you use Azure DevOps or other DevOps solutions, this gives you easy image patching, versioning, and regional replication capabilities.

Finally, Azure Image Builder service offers unmatched governance and compliance where role-based access control is integrated so you can determine who has access in which images and connect your existing VNET to access routable resources, servers, and services, including configuration servers (DSC, Chef, Puppet, and more). Deploying Azure Image Builder does not require a public IP address, which ensures the safety and gives you full control of the asset you’re building.

We’ve designed this service to take on the heavy-lifting when you’re building your next customized image, to meet the corporate and regulatory compliance rules, and preconfiguring VMs with applications for faster deployment without the hassle they used to require. You don't need to spend time learning how to build or maintain image pipelines, learn new tools, or have different tools. Simply describe your image configuration in a template, using your new or existing commands, scripts, build artifacts, and Azure Image Builder will create it for you.

Azure Image Build is expected to be generally available in Q3 2020.

Next steps with Azure Image Builder

Try Azure Image Builder in preview today with these resources:

Learn more about Azure Image Builder service.
Learn how to use Azure Image Builder with an image gallery for Linux virtual machines and Windows virtual machines.
Watch the Azure Image Builder Ignite webcast for a deep-dive into how Azure Image Builder and Shared Image Gallery can help you.

Quelle: Azure

The Azure SQL family: Innovation and value in the cloud

How businesses respond in times of uncertainty is as varied as the businesses themselves. Many slow down operations to operate more cost-effectively, while others lean into new opportunities that didn’t exist before. Regardless of how you respond, ensuring your organization can cost-effectively adapt and scale to rapidly changing conditions is key.

When it comes to migrating your data, you have a variety of options to consider, and it’s important to have the flexibility to choose a path that helps you respond to uncertainty in a way that makes the most sense for your business. Azure SQL is here to help.

Introducing Azure SQL

Azure SQL is a family of fully managed, secure, and intelligent SQL database services that support a wide range of application patterns, from re-hosting and modernizing existing SQL Server workloads to modern cloud application development.

Because the entire Azure SQL family is built upon the same SQL Server database engine, you can migrate applications with ease and continue to use the tools, languages, and resources you’re familiar with. You’ll discover that your skills and experience transfer easily to the cloud, as the innovative features in Azure SQL help you operate more efficiently and save money along the way.

Azure SQL helps you do more

Azure SQL has options for any budget. You can choose managed services that are automatically patched, updated, and backed-up for you, so you can refocus resources onto higher priorities. A recent Forrester study found operational and financial benefits of modernizing applications on Azure SQL, citing a three-year 238 percent return on investment and up to a 40 percent increase in database administrator (DBA) productivity, among other benefits.1

Azure SQL also helps you stay agile in an ever-changing world by reducing your costs and simplifying performance management. Serverless compute, for example, continuously right-sizes resources to meet workload demand. Hyperscale storage is built on a flexible, cloud native architecture that allows it to grow as needed, rapidly scaling up to 100 TB. Built-in AI powers intelligent features like automatic tuning and Advanced Threat Protection, which maintain peak performance and data protection on your behalf.

SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines offers similar efficiency and cost-effectiveness with Azure BlobCache, which is automatically provisioned for Azure Marketplace images and gives fast, free reads for customers. Given that typical SQL Server workloads are read-heavy, this provides tremendous savings.

Azure SQL comes with industry leading offers

In addition to the operational and financial benefits that come with managed services, Azure SQL can help reduce your upfront costs with industry-leading pricing and special offers, such as:

Azure Hybrid Benefit—If you have SQL Server and Windows licenses with active Software Assurance, you can reuse those licenses in the cloud and save up to 82 percent2 off pay-as-you-go rates on SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Database.
Reservation pricing—Get more cloud for less cost when you commit upfront to a one- or three-year term. With reservation pricing, you can save up to 80 percent3 versus pay-as-you-go pricing, and you can exchange or cancel unused reservations at any time.
Azure Dev/Test Pricing—Use your Visual Studio subscriptions to get discounted pricing and Azure credits for non-production scenarios, with savings up to 55 percent off pay-as-you-go pricing on Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance and Ubuntu Linux rates on SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines.

Get started

Need help with next steps? We can guide you to the right Azure SQL service that best meets the needs of your database workload, and you can get started today.

 

1 “The Total Economic ImpactTM of Migration to Azure SQL Managed Databases,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting in March 2020 on behalf of Microsoft.

2 Calculations based on scenarios running 744 hours/month for 12 months at 3-year Reserved Instances or Reserved Capacity. Prices as of 10/24/2018, subject to change. Azure Windows VM calculations based on one D2V3 Azure VM in US West 2 region at the SUSE Linux Enterprise Basic rate. AWS calculations based on one m5.Large VM in US West (Oregon) using Windows Server pay-as-you-go rate for Reserved Instances under Standard 3-year term, all upfront payment. SQL Server calculations based on 8 vCore Azure SQL Database Managed Instance Business Critical in US West 2 running at Azure Hybrid Benefit rate. AWS calculations based on RDS for SQL EE for db.r4.2xlarge on US West (Oregon) in a multi AZ deployment for Reserved Instances under Standard 3-year term, all upfront payment. Extended security updates cost used for AWS is based on Windows Server Standard open NL ERP pricing in USD. Actual savings may vary based on region, instance size, and performance tier. Savings exclude Software Assurance costs, which may vary based on Volume Licensing agreement. Contact your sales representative for details.

3 The 80% saving for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines is based on the combined cost of Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server and 3-year Azure Reserved Instance. The estimate does not include Software Assurance costs. Sample annual cost comparison of two D2V3 Windows Server VMs. Savings based on two D2V3 VMs in US West 2 Region running 744 hours/month for 12 months; Base compute rate at SUSE Linux Enterprise rate for US West 2. Azure pricing as of 04/24/2018. Prices subject to change. Actual savings may vary based on location, instance type, or usage. The 80% savings for Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance is based on eight vCore SQL Database Business Critical in West 2 US Region, running 730 hours per month. Savings are calculated from on demand full price (license included) against base rate with Azure Hybrid Benefit plus 3-year reserved capacity commitment. Savings excludes Software Assurance cost for SQL Server Enterprise edition, which may vary based on EA agreement. Actual savings may vary based on region, instance size and performance tier. Prices as of November 2018, subject to change.
Quelle: Azure