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Tag: cloud application

  • Rubrik Looks to Meld Data Management and DevOps

    Rubrik Looks to Meld Data Management and DevOps

    During its FORWARD Digital Summit event last week, Rubrik made a case for the melding of DevOps and data management.

    The company announced that its Polaris Data Management Platform, delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, has added the ability to protect workloads running on virtual machines on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Rubrik already provides support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure clouds.

    In addition, Rubrik announced it has extended its AWS data protection support to include the Amazon Relational Database Service along with support for the OneDrive cloud service from Microsoft. Rubrik already provides support for Microsoft Office 365.

    While most of the revenue Rubrik generates comes from data protection delivered as a service, president Dan Rogers said Rubrik is really a provider of a data management platform. With more applications heading into the cloud, it’s now only a matter of time before DevOps teams start to leverage the Rubrik application programming interface (API) to make the Polaris platform a vehicle for accessing large amounts of data, he said, noting Polaris is built from the ground up using GraphQL APIs and metadata that make it programmatically accessible.

    Of course, Polaris today is accessed most often by IT operations teams via a graphical user interface (GUI). That approach allows Polaris to bridge legacy approaches to data management alongside emerging DevOps environments. It’s not clear to what degree DevOps teams are programmatically invoking platforms such as Polaris, but as applications are developed and deployed at faster rates DevOps teams have a vested interest in a platform that makes it easier to access the data those applications require.

    Rogers also noted data protection platforms play a major role in application development and testing environments. Developers need to be able to recover the previous iteration of the application following a crash.

    IT teams are also making extensive use of the backup capabilities provided by a data protection platform to migrate data from on-premises IT environments into the cloud.

    Rubrik is not the only provider of a data management platform being delivered via a set of SaaS applications. The company has been making a case to initially replace on-premises data protection offerings with a cloud approach that in addition to data protection software makes data management tools available to address tasks such as data governance and compliance as well as metadata management.

    It’s not clear to what degree data management and protection will be automated. However, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rogers noted more organizations will be accelerating the rate at which IT management platforms of all types are accessed as a cloud service. With many IT operations teams now working from home for what may be an extended time period, organizations will be migrating to platforms that lend themselves more easily to being remotely accessed, he said. In fact, it’s already apparent that in some cases IT teams—like it or not—may never be returning to an office again.

  • NetApp Grabs CloudJumper to Manage Windows Desktops in the Cloud

    NetApp Grabs CloudJumper to Manage Windows Desktops in the Cloud

    NetApp today announced it has acquired CloudJumper, a provider of management tools for virtual desktops at a time when the rate at which Windows desktops are moving into the cloud is accelerating.

    Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager of NetApp’s Cloud Data Services business unit, said NetApp will primarily employ CloudJumper as a software-as-a-service application that complements the Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) service provided by Microsoft on the Azure cloud. However, CloudJumper is also available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform.

    CloudJumper has also been rebranded as NetApp Virtual Desktop Service (VDS) on NetApp Cloud Central, a control plane for managing NetApp cloud services, and integrated with Azure NetApp Files and Cloud Volumes.

    Lye said that as NetApp extended the reach of its data management platforms into the cloud it became apparent even before the COVID-19 pandemic that large numbers of desktops were moving into the cloud, thanks to the general availability of WVD and end of life for support for Windows 7. The COVID-19 pandemic is serving as a catalyst to further accelerate that shift as organizations look to make their IT environments both more flexible and resilient, said Lye.

    As more desktops shift to the cloud, it then only becomes a matter of time before those virtual desktops create the need for additional NetApp data management services that already reside natively on cloud platforms such as Azure, he added.

    While there is general agreement that more desktops will be moving into the cloud, the rate at which that transition will occur is debatable, since many organizations have limited resources to invest in IT projects. However, Lye said there are also many organizations that will take this moment to accelerate their transition to the cloud.

    The one thing that is for certain is the number of desktops deployed locally will decline steadily in on-premises IT environments. End users may still have a local device, but the amount of compute power required to access Windows desktops in the cloud should be substantially less. That’s critical as more organizations also are abandoning traditional desktops in favor of mobile computing devices that enable end users to work from anywhere. In fact, it’s not even clear to what degree the IT professionals supporting virtual desktops will need to be in an office when the management tools being employed all reside in the cloud.

    Clearly, in terms of Windows deployments, the next year may be the most transformational in recent memory. The impact on IT professionals will be especially profound as the need to physically service individual endpoints becomes less required. Of course, the transition to virtual desktops has been a long time coming. More than a few organizations have embraced virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) with mixed success. However, now that virtual desktops have gone mainstream in the cloud, many IT organizations will soon be wondering why it took so long to actually make that happen.

  • Deploying into Azure App Service using Azure DevOps CI/CD Pipeline

    Deploying into Azure App Service using Azure DevOps CI/CD Pipeline

    This article demonstrates how to deploy an application into Azure App Service using Azure DevOps (VSTS) continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.

    In this article, you’ll create a sample environment to:

    • New build based on code commit to your Azure DevOps Repo.
    • Automatically deploy your app into Azure.

    Prerequisites:

    • Azure Portal Account, Azure subscription and Azure DevOps (VSTS) account.
    • Azure Resource Group.
    • Create a web app in Azure. Make note of the app service URL—you need it later.

    What is Azure App Service?

    Azure App Service enables you to build and host web apps, mobile backends and RESTful APIs in the programming language of your choice without managing infrastructure. It offers auto-scaling and high availability, supports both Windows and Linux, and enables automated deployments from GitHub, Azure DevOps or any Git repo.

    Creating Resource Group in Azure

    Once you have a subscription in Azure, you need to create a resource group to manage resources in Azure. The best practice is to maintain a separate resource group for each environment (DEV, INT, QA, STAG, PERF, PROD) and follow the proper naming conventions. To create a resource group, select Resource Group from left-side blade, click on +Add, then select Subscription, give a proper name to the resource group and click on Review + Create.

    Creating App Service

    Click on All resources from the left-side blade of the panel and click on Add, then select Web App and give a proper name to your app service. Then select Subscription and select the existing resource group. Keep the remaining option as default. and click on Create.

    Once you have created the app service, click on that app service and go to Overview. There you can identify all the details that belong to this app service, including status, resource group, subscription and URL (please make a note of this; you’ll need it later).

    Creating Service Principal

    When an application needs access to deploy or configure resources through ARM or VSTS in Azure, you’ll need to create a service principal, which is a credential for your application.

    Go to Azure Active Directory -> App registrations -> New application registration, then give a name to the service principle, select application type and give it a URL of your choice. After creating the app registration, go to Settings from that service and make note of application ID,  then go to Keys create a key and copy the secret value. (Note: It doesn’t appear later, so please store it in safe place.)

     

    Create a New Project in VSTS

    The first step is to create an account in Azure DevOps (VSTS), then follow the steps below to start an application deployment. Here I’m taking sample open source java-based code from GitHub repository and importing it to Azure DevOps repo. (You can push your own source code into repo.) It is a simple multi-module Maven project. The application is a very simple online version of Conway’s “Game of Life.”

    To create a new project, click on Create new project, give a proper name to your project and select create. Then go to Repos, click on Import, then select source type, type in the above URL in the Clone URL tab and select Import. The source code will import into your repository.

    We need give service connections to our project, so go to project settings from the bottom of blade in our project home directory and then select Service Connections -> New Service connection -> Azure Resource Manager. Click on “Use the full version of the service connection dialog” from the pop-up, then paste the Application ID into the Service principal client ID tab and the secret key value into the Service principal key tab (which you saved during app registration creation). Then click OK.

    Creating a Continuous Integration (CI) Build

    Go to Pipelines -> Build -> New Build Pipeline, then click on “Use the visual designer.” It will ask source code repo details, so select Azure Repos Git and select Team project, which you created at the start of the project, select Repository and branch name, then click Continue.

    Next, select a template Maven, type in the pipeline name and select Hosted VS2017 for the Agent pool, and click on pom.xml in the Maven POM file. There you can list the goal(s) as Clean Package and select Copy Files. At the contents section please enter **/*.war then go to Publish Artifact: drop, list the artifact name as Gameoflife and keep all remaining options as default values. Then, under Triggers, select Enable continuous integration and give branch filters listed at right, which enables the continuous integration feature. Once a developer commits their changes into master, the CI build will trigger automatically.

    Once the configuration is complete, click on Save and Queue from top of pipeline to trigger a CI build. (Every commit into master will trigger a new build.)

    Creating Continuous Delivery (CD) Pipeline

     Go to Pipelines -> Releases -> New Release Pipeline, then select the template Azure App Service deployment, list the stage name as DEV and click on Add an artifact. Select project and source (build pipeline), then select default version as Latest, click on Add. Cick on Task (below the DEV), select Run on agent and select agent pool as Hosted VS2017, then click on the plus(+) symbol, search for template File Rename and select the .war file from source file and give it the new name ROOT.war.

    In the Display name box, list Azure App Service Deploy. In the Azure subscription field, you need to select a service principal name to authorize the resources. Then choose the App type and App Service name. In the Package or folder selection, select war file and rename it ROOT.war, because for java-based applications we need to deploy our app into a proper directory structure.

    Finally, select the template Azure App service manager and select the Restart option, making sure to select the same subscription and app service name you selected in the Azure app service deploy window. Click on Save, then click on Release -> Create a release -> select artifact build number -> create. Build will then trigger and deploy into the app service.

    Now, your code is successfully deployed into Azure App Service.

    You can access using app service URL from any browser (e.g.,  https://xyz-abc-webjob-01.azurewebsites.net) and you can check whether code is deployed successfully or not using below URL: https://xyz-abc-webjob-01.scm.azurewebsites.net.

    — Srinivas Kudipudi