I have recently been looking at copying entire collections of data on Azure, in a way that should run as either Azure Functions or Webjobs. This is useful for backups, and simply moving data between environments. I didn't come across too many good samples of how to do this, so I expect it can be a useful topic for others who need to do the same thing.

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Recently I had the need to setup easy auth using Azure B2C to authenticate users across a frontend Azure Web App and an Azure Functions backend. Allthough it sounds like a regular scenario, the documentation I found could have been better. I don’t have the time to write the complete docs, but this blogpost will outline the steps, so I can remember it for next time, and hopefully to enable you to do the same kind of setup. Let’s get cracking. More...

Cloud native is one of those words that make some people shake their heads and call BS. In some contexts I am one of those people. It does however also have its place, because building solutions that are cloud centric does come with a number of benefits and enables solutions that were very hardif not impossible pre-cloud.

Sure, you can script the setup of a server from scratch, but it requires quite a bit of work, it takes time to execute and you still end up with an environment that requires updates and patching as soon as the script is a week old. In a cloud setup good practices, in the form of DevOps mainly using the CLI makes this very obtainable. Actually the current environment I am working with combines an ARM template and a few lines of script so we can spin up an entire environment in about 15 minutes. The only manual step is setting up the domain and SSL cert, but even that could be scripted if I wanted to.

One of the really nice things about Azure Webapps is the support for running Webjobs. Most large webapplications will at some point need some data or media processed by a background process, and for that Webjobs are a perfect fit.

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A few weeks ago Microsoft introduced the concept of "Cool" Blob Storage on Azure, which means that you get REALLY cheap storage for data that you don't access very often - backup being an obvious usecase. In my case I have used Dropbox for backups for a while, and although it works fine for a certain amount of data, it is not really a good fit for backing up that family photos and videos once a year from the home NAS.

A core value that Azure brings to modern projects, is to enable developers to take control of the deployment process, and make it fast and painless. Sure scalability is nice, when and if you need it, but the speed and flexibility in setting up an entire environment for your application is always valuable - so for me this is a more important feature of Azure. Gone are the days of waiting at best days, most likely weeks and maybe even months for the IT department to create a new development or test environment.

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At Build there was a number of huge announcements. It is amazing to see that Azure is keeping up the pace, and as a developer I am excited about the promise of services that will enable me to focus on implementing solutions rather than fiddeling with servers and infrastructure.

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Besides App Services, Azure offers an alternative that is slightly to the left of the far right on the big IaaS to PaaS scale called Azure Service Fabric. Conceptually Service Fabric is based on containers, allowing you to fit many services into a single VM and it gives you more fine grained control than with App Services by providing a manifest describing how it should operate.

I had the pleasure of going to TechEd North America 2012 in Orlando. With a lot of interesting news comming out of Microsoft it was 5 very exciting days. While I was away I did some blogging on the company blog (in danish).

As you might expect Azure and Windows Metro style design were the big topics of the conference. With Azure finally taking a direction that I think makes it interesting, and Windows 8 in general looking like the next milestone for Microsoft it was really good.