Migrating a Two-Tier Application to Azure: A Hands-on Walkthrough of Azure Infrastructure, Platform, and Container Services

Abstract

Understand and build a proof of concept by migrating a multi-tiered .NET Core web application to the Azure public cloud, leveraging different Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS), Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Azure Container offerings. These include Azure Container Instance (ACI), Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), and CI/CD pipeline deployments using Azure DevOps. After a first chapter in which you set up the baseline for the lab scenarios, you will start with the basics of automating Azure resource deployments using Visual Studio and powerful Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. Next, you'll learn about the importance of performing proper assessments and the tools Microsoft offers to help in this migration preparation phase. After that, you will validate the virtual machine deployment and learn about SQL Server database migration to SQL Azure PaaS, as well as deploying and migrating web applications to Azure Web Apps. After covering these foundational platform components, the next chapters focus on the core concepts and advantages of using containers for running business workloads. These labs are based on Docker, Azure Container Registry (ACR), ACI, and Web App for Containers, and show you how to enable container orchestration and cloud-scale using AKS. In the last part of the book, you will work with Azure DevOps, the Microsoft application lifecycle environment, building a CI/CD pipeline to publish workloads using the DevOps principles and concepts. You'll see the integration with the rest of the Azure services, closing with a module on overall Azure monitoring and operations and what tools Azure has available to assist your IT teams in this challenge.