Week 4 #100WeeksofAzure

Troubleshooting Azure File Shares

Experiencing high latency when using Azure File Shares can be due to a number of reasons. The share may be throttled but if you enable 'large file shares' they will support 10,000 IOPS per share. I learned about metadata-centric operations (createfile, openfile, closefile, queryinfo etc) and was surprised that these are heavier (terminology??) operations than read/write. There are metrics in Azure Storage monitoring for these two causes! There's also pre-canned end-end latency metrics. Excellent.

Azure Migrate - Discovery

My colleague walked me through a couple of scenarios for enabling Azure Migrate to collect information from servers on-prem, in a public cloud (not Azure) and hosted on various hyper-visors. In this scenario there's also some tricky networking constraints to battle with. Tricky network I thought, don't want to use the public internet and don't want to flood any bottlenecks - I've seen this before - "Use a private endpoint" I said. Umm no, as of today Azure Migrate doesn't support single endpoints but it does support Microsoft Peering. I'll come back to the networking thing in the next topic. What it does have is the Azure Migrate Appliance for agentless metadata collection across all the abovementioned scenarios.

Squid Proxy...

..was the answer to the networking challenge, all that was needed was some simple forwarding to a zone where the public internet could be used to transfer the metadata to Azure. Squid is free - hooray!

Azure Functions

As part of my study for the AZ-303 exam I ran through the tutorial to create an Azure Function with JavaScript and then deploy it to a Functions App. The function itself is basic, it uses an http trigger, you pass it a variable, it writes some text on webpage and then stores the variable passed in a storage queue. I do a lot of tutorials...I also have quite a childish sense of humour and I may be known to swear on occasion. To keep my tutorials extra interesting I use "alternative" phrases to "Hello World" and it always makes me giggle to see my unproffessional text written on a webpage and in this case, in my storage queue on Azure.

Azure VSCode Extensions

The best thing about this tutorial was the Azure extensions for VSCode - the Azure Functions extension allows you to pass your variables in and then creates all the .json files you need and because I used JavaScript and Node it created files for those things too. It also has a shortcut to create bindings for the function and to push the whole lot straight to a Function App. There's also an Azure Storage extension, a basic Azure subscription management extension, an ARM template extension and a Pipelines one. These are the ones I've used so far and they're basically making everything 'lower code'.

PowerShell Execution Policy

What I learned - On the first page of the create a Function tutorial I couldn't get the launch.json to run. Such a positive feeling when you can't get past the third step! I learned (after reading the error multiple times - then searching the interwebs) that by default on Windows client the PowerShell script execution policy is set to 'restricted'. You can check the current policy using get-executionpolicy and I amended for myself (temporarily) using set-executionpolicy -scope current user

Bonus

I'm becoming more interested in what different ports are assigned to by default, looked up 9229 which is the default TCP port for node - Learned that TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol. I've been playing 'Control' on Xbox lately and now TCP sounds super ominous!

Happy New Year everyone.

Azure. Create with purpose.