32 posts tagged with "Azure"

You have learned Kubernetes concepts — pods, deployments, services. You have played with Minikube locally. Now you need to run a real production cluster, and the thought of managing etcd backups, control plane upgrades, and certificate rotations makes you want to reconsider your career choices. That is exactly why AKS exists. Azure manages the control plane for free. You manage your workloads.

If you have been following this series, every example so far has used AWS. But Terraform is cloud-agnostic, and Azure is one of the most well-supported providers in the ecosystem. The AzureRM provider has 700+ resource types covering everything from VMs to Cosmos DB to AKS. This post walks you through Azure fundamentals with Terraform — authentication, resource groups, networking, and a full Linux VM deployment.

It is 2 AM and your application is down. The on-call engineer opens the Azure portal, stares at a wall of services, and asks the worst question in operations: "Where do I even start looking?" Azure Monitor is the answer. It collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry from every layer of your infrastructure — from VM CPU spikes to application exceptions to user click patterns. But only if you set it up properly before that 2 AM call.

Your team pushes code to a repository, someone manually builds it, zips it up, and deploys it by dragging files into a portal. On Fridays. That workflow is a ticking time bomb. Azure DevOps Pipelines replaces the entire manual chain with automated, repeatable, auditable deployments — from git push to production with approvals, testing, and rollback built in.

Your API receives three requests per hour on weekdays and zero on weekends, but your VM runs 24/7 costing you $70 a month. That is the exact problem serverless computing solves. Azure Functions lets you write code that runs only when triggered — and you pay only for execution time measured in milliseconds. No server provisioning, no capacity planning, no idle compute burning money.

You have just built a brilliant application. Now comes the question that has sparked a thousand architecture review meetings: which database? Azure offers over a dozen managed database services, and picking the wrong one means either rewriting your data layer six months later or paying triple what you should. Let's cut through the confusion and build a real decision framework.