From the operations team's point of view, there are numerous aspects of running a cloud application properly, typical of which are:
- Application data must be regularly backed up, the time it takes to restore the data must be as little as possible. Quick restore means less downtime, less downtime means happier customers.
- It is preferable for the cloud application to be portable, which means it can be moved back and forth between a cloud-hosted datacenter and your on-premises environment without any modifications to the source code.
- Maintentance tasks should be automated and include as few steps as possible to reduce the probability of human error.
Nowadays, public cloud vendors offer quite different functionality as regards application maintenance. While some of them concentrate on rich web-based management UI, others invest their efforts in building a powerful API to automate these tasks. The more experienced and mature vendors do both. With this in mind, you have to weigh your typical operation tasks against the management features provided by concrete cloud vendor.
Having had some experience with migrating on-premises applications to Windows Azure, we must admit that while the new Metro-style management portal is quite pleasant and easy to use, it does not yet provide some features commonly required by our IT pros. For example, automatically backing up Windows Azure SQL Databases and restoring them locally is possible, but involves quite a lot of manual steps. Things become a little more difficult when you encounter such tasks as backing up data from on-premises applications to cloud storage as well as restoring such backups later: if you use private blob containers, managing such blobs is quite tedious because of the lack of UI tools.
In order to help the operations staff with common tasks, we have developed a few automated command-line tools that utilize various Windows Azure APIs behind the scenes. The source code is released under MIT License and is available on GitHub.
Having had some experience with migrating on-premises applications to Windows Azure, we must admit that while the new Metro-style management portal is quite pleasant and easy to use, it does not yet provide some features commonly required by our IT pros. For example, automatically backing up Windows Azure SQL Databases and restoring them locally is possible, but involves quite a lot of manual steps. Things become a little more difficult when you encounter such tasks as backing up data from on-premises applications to cloud storage as well as restoring such backups later: if you use private blob containers, managing such blobs is quite tedious because of the lack of UI tools.
In order to help the operations staff with common tasks, we have developed a few automated command-line tools that utilize various Windows Azure APIs behind the scenes. The source code is released under MIT License and is available on GitHub.
1. Backup Windows Azure SQL Database to Blob Storage.
This tool allows you to perform an automated backup of your SQL Database and store the backup to your Windows Azure Storage account as a blob (in BACPAC format). Later, this backup can be used to restore the database on another cloud SQL Database server as well as an on-premises Microsoft SQL Server instance. Internally, this tool utilizes DAC web service endpoints hosted on Windows Azure datacenters. Note that for every location the URL of the web service is different.
Usage example:
AzureSqlDbBlobBackup.exe
--dac-service-url https://by1prod-dacsvc.azure.com/DACWebService.svc
--db-server-name abcdef1234.database.windows.net
--db-name Northwind
--db-username db-admin
--db-password db-admin-secret
--storage-account northwindstorage
--storage-account-key s0e1c2r3e4t==
--blob-container backups
--blob-name NorthwindBackup.bacpac
--append-timestamp
2. Archive local files or folders to Blob Storage.
This tool allows you to upload zip-compressed copies of your local data to Windows Azure Storage, which can be helpful if you frequently use cloud as a reliable off-site storage for your digital assets.
Usage example:
Usage example:
ZipToAzureBlob.exe --source-path E:\MyData --compression-level=9 --storage-account northwindstorage --storage-account-key s0e1c2r3e4t== --blob-container backup --blob-name MyDataBackup.zip --append-timestamp3. Download files from (private) Windows Azure Blobs.
The purpose of this tool is quite straightforward: it enables you to download a blob from Windows Azure Blob Storage to your local filesystem, which works especially good when the blobs are stored in a private container, thus not so easily downloadable from the management portal. This tool, combined with the zip-archiving tool above, provides a pretty quick and easy solution for automating the process of data backup/restore that utilizes reliable cloud storage.
Usage example:
Usage example:
DownloadAzureBlob.exe --storage-account northwindstorage --storage-account-key s0e1c2r3e4t== --blob-container backup --blob-name MyDataBackup.zip
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