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"Cold storage tier of Azure Storage is a new tier that is available for Azure Storage for data that needs to be persisted for long time with minimum costs. This tier should be used when data is not accessed frequently." The newly introduced access tiers of hot and cold storage are well explained in the two links below. In short: Availability: Hot tier 99.99% (RA-GRS) vs Cold tier only 99.9% Cost: "HOT storage cost of storage is higher than the Cold one (more than double), but in the same time the transaction cost is almost double for Cold storage." Latency: for both tiers milliseconds Sources: (Part 1) Azure Storage - Cold Tier | Things that we should know (Part 2) Azure Storage - Cold Tier | Business use cases where we could use it

The top 3 Azure links are: Azure portal Azure Billing Azure Pricing Calculator

If you're new to the Azure PowerShell save yourself some hassle and immediately go to PowerShell Version 5. Otherwise you will end up struggling with many issues like: PS C:\Windows\system32> Import-AzureRM Import-AzureRM : The term 'Import-AzureRM' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again. At line:1 char:1 + Import-AzureRM + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (Import-AzureRM:String) [], CommandNotFoundException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException Windows 7 for example usually has version 3 installed. You can check the version by simply pasting into the command prompt: $PSVersionTable How to upgrade to PowerShell 5? Well, just by installing the WMF 5 . And a general remark for PowerShell: Run as Administrator. Sources: How to install and configure Az...

Azure introduced new terms and concepts for IP Addressing. Dynamic IP address (DIP) the internal addresses assigned to VMs either come from a private pool assigned by Azure, or if you configure an Azure virtual network (VNET), you can define your own private IP addresses ranges and subnets survive OS reboots and service healing migration events but when stopped, it might be assigned a different DIP when re-provisioned Virtual IP address (VIP) Azure randomly assigns cloud services a VIP released when all VMs in a cloud service are deallocated (stopped) VIP is shared by all VMs in the same cloud service Microsoft allows you to reserve up to five VIPs in an Azure subscription on VMs with multiple NICs, only supported on a VM’s default NIC Instance-level public IP address (PIP) are assigned to a VMs default NIC, and are exposed directly to the Internet, so traffic should be controlled using the W...

"There’s a never-ending stream of things developers apparently must know about, but at the same time confusion around all the different ways of accomplishing the same thing. It’s not easy to put all these pieces together and see the “big picture.”" You can roughly segment Azure into three layers: the datacenter infrastructure infrastructure services platform services Sources: Microsoft Azure - Microsoft Azure--the Big Picture, By Tony Meleg, October 2015

There is a nice article on Azure AD on the things to consider when thinking about working with Azure Active Directory. "Microsoft's identity and access management (IAM) strategy has mostly been playing out in the cloud with its Azure AD service." "Microsoft has three components that power its Azure IAM solutions." Azure cloud computing services, which serve as Microsoft's infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution Azure AD Premium, [..] Microsoft's "Identity Management as a Service" offering (abbreviated as "IDaaS"). Microsoft's IDaaS provides IAM services for Azure services that are built on the Azure platform. "identity bridge" solutions. An identity bridge is an on-premises component that's used to synchronize local directories to Microsoft's IDaaS and enable single sign-on to IDaaS. Microsoft's identity bridge solutions can bridge Kerberos and LDAP to JSON over REST, as well as SAML. Mark Dio...

In the attempt to combine private cloud (aka on-premise installation), public cloud (e.g. Microsoft Azure) and hosted cloud (servers provided by 3rd parties) Microsoft released a while ago the Azure Service Bus through the additional install for Windows Server 2012 R2 called "Windows Azure Pack". The Service Bus provides unified messaging capabilities across the different deployment scenarios. It addresses 3 core scenarios: 1. Application Messaging Patterns with Service Bus Messaging with the Service Bus allows building loosely coupled applications. "To enable a wide variety of messaging scenarios, Service Bus provides message queues and “Publish/Subscribe” topics. A queue is a message store in which messages are ordered by send date. One or multiple senders can send messages into a queue, and one or multiple receivers can read and remove messages from the queue. Once a receiver has received a message, that message cannot be received by another receiver. T...

Azure web and mobile apps can be hosted for free, even beyond the 30-day trial. Apparently also SQL Azure can be used with a 20 MB DB size limit. Sources: Azure Pricing Azure App Service Pricing Get a free 20-MB SQL database to power your Mobile Services and Web Sites Keywords: Azure, Webhosting, Web App, Mobile App, SQL Azure