Microsoft Azure developers must have the following nine competencies.

When designing cloud applications, you need different talents and a different attitude than when developing on-premises applications. This is due to the cloud’s vast global size and reliability, as well as services and features not available on-premises. An Azure Developer is one who creates cloud-based applications making use of the benefits of the cloud architecture.

To cope with this new reality, you must reconsider some of your previous skills and learn new ones. microsoft cybersecurity architect have been telling some important skills which a person must adapt to cope up with future. Here are the nine fundamental skills you must have while designing cloud software, with a special emphasis on developing apps for Microsoft Azure.

1. Plan for uncertainty.

Unpredictability? Isn’t the cloud meant to be reliable and accessible? Yes, but you don’t have control over the server on which your application is operating if you want high availability and other cloud benefits. This is when the unpredictability comes into play.

When you execute an application in Azure (for example, on an App Service Web App), it runs on a server in a Microsoft datacenter. Everything, including server less applications, runs on servers. However, Azure controls the servers and leverages internal services, such as its Service Fabric, to run your application, resulting in a 99.95 percent uptime. When Azure determines that the server hosting your app will fail within the next hour or that your app would be better off operating on a different server for performance reasons, it will shift your app to a different server.

Because you don’t know where your program is operating, you shouldn’t save and cache data in local memory, the local registry, or the local file system. It’s possible that you scale and can no longer access the files since you’re running on a different server. Instead, use external services for data storage and caching, such as Azure Storage or Azure Redis Cache. This ensures that your data is always accessible, regardless of what happens to your app or the server that hosts it.

2. Create with a cost-benefit analysis in mind.

You just pay for what you use on the cloud (most of the time). There are also many services that run continuously, regardless of whether they are used. In any event, you should keep the prices of your applications in mind. This entails being cognizant of how CPU cycles, memory, storage, and bandwidth are used.

Consider bandwidth.

Consider the following example: You wish to transfer an on-premises SQL Server system to an Azure SQL Database (the Azure equivalent of SQL Server). After altering all of the application connection strings to the new database—including some of the applications that are still operating on-premises—the next step would be to move those to the cloud. You might assume everything is fine until you notice that one of the on-premises programs copies the entire database to memory every hour to analyze the data.

You pay for exiting data on Azure (outgoing traffic is termed egress; incoming traffic is called ingress), so if you’re not paying attention to bandwidth, you may find yourself with an unexpectedly hefty bill at the end of the month.

Consider performance.

In addition to data, you must be cautious of the CPU and memory that you utilize. When you use an Azure Function, for example, you are charged for the amount of processing time and power required to execute your function (see the details here). This means that if you have a slow function that uses a lot of CPU cycles and memory, you will be charged extra. Especially when millions of them are carried out each month.

Reduce the size of your services and switch them off.

Aside from making your apps more efficient, you can also save money by scaling down your services; you can turn off or scale down VMs when they are not in use. When the load is low, you can scale your App Services to a lower pricing tier and fewer instances. The cloud’s capacity to scale up and scale down is what makes it adaptable and cost effective.

3. Extend your applications

The cloud makes it simple to scale your applications up, down, out, and in, allowing you to easily migrate to a more capable server (scale up) by raising the number of program instances (scale out), and vice versa (scale down and in) (scale down and in). All of this is possible with the push of a button. Smart individuals have done the hard work so that we no longer need to consider establishing web farms. Now all we have to do is click and drag a slider up and down.

The platform is easily scalable, but does your app? That is all up to you. You must ensure that when you create a new instance of your program, it continues to execute. This means that you must consider things like state in your application. Where do you keep it (assuming you keep it at all)? What if you want to scale globally? What if you have one instance of your application in the United States and another in Asia? How do you direct your users to the appropriate application instance? Your application must be able to deal with several instances, and you must plan for this.

Azure can assist with difficulties such as global scale. Azure Traffic Manager is a service that may route users to the most performant application instance for them based on their location. More information about how this service works can be found in the Building a Global App with Azure PaaS course.

4. Resize your data

When scaling your apps, you must also scale your data. This is more challenging than scaling your apps since you must consider: Where the data may be stored; How to bring the data close to the consumers in order to minimize latency and maximize speed; and How to deal with transactional consistency.

These are difficult difficulties, and the answers are entirely dependent on your situation, such as who your users are, where they are, what type of data you retain, what the company policies and regulations are, and so on.

Azure’s Azure Cosmos DB offering provides some assistance. This allows you to simply duplicate data to different regions and select the level of transactional consistency required. However, if your data isn’t allowed to be saved in every location where you want it to be, this may not be a good option for you.

In that instance, consider sharding your data so that some of it is in one place and some is in another. Azure SQL Elastic Database Pools and the related Elastic Database Tools can be of assistance.

5. Create a pipeline for monitoring and diagnostics.

In the cloud, you’ll frequently find yourself running a slew of various services that comprise your system. Perhaps you’re working with microservices that individually run in a cloud container, communicate with databases, and make use of a security service like Azure Active Directory. Because of the cloud’s loosely connected and distributed structure, it’s tough to gain a solid overview of what’s going on and determine the health of your system.

You must set up a pipeline to monitor your services and, if necessary, diagnose them. Fortunately, Azure takes care of the plumbing. To get a good picture of how things are doing on Azure, use the Azure Monitor service. Each service and piece of infrastructure can be outfitted with a more comprehensive logging mechanism, such as Application Insights for applications and Log Analytics for infrastructure. When you need diagnostics, you can debug your apps in Visual Studio or even in production with the Snapshot Debugger.

Although these services are beneficial, it is your responsibility to integrate all of the applications required to monitor and generate an overview of their health.

6. Prepare for resiliency

The cloud is designed to be resilient. This means that it keeps your apps running even if a server fails. To achieve this robustness, the cloud employs various methods that you should be aware of and account for in your applications.

The majority of these systems are motivated by self-preservation. When an Azure SQL Database is busy executing queries, it will limit incoming requests in order to keep running and avoid shutting down. This means that your query to the database may fail because Azure SQL refuses to accept it. This is a transient state. When the Azure SQL Database is no longer overburdened, it can accept and handle new requests. This is how it survives and thrives.

Your database call may also fail if the platform determines that it has to process fewer requests from you in order to process more requests from another customer (when you are on a pricing tier that shares hardware). The answer is straightforward: retry your calls to external services using the Retry Pattern, which is taught in the Cloud Design Patterns for Azure: Availability and Resilience course. The retry pattern is implemented in most Azure SDKs, but it’s useful to be aware of it and, if necessary, tweak the retry method.

7. Create scripts for your environments

It is critical in the cloud to script your environments so that you have them as code (infrastructure as code). When you have a script that can generate and update your entire infrastructure, you can easily break it down and rebuild it when needed. This enables you to pay for your infrastructure only when you use it.

The same is true when a tragedy strikes. If your environment(s) are lost due to a data center failure. You can quickly restore them with the same environment as before.

It’s also advantageous to have your infrastructure as code, which allows you to deploy and update it automatically. You can utilize Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to generate code from your infrastructure (or vice versa). Deploy it using Azure Automation or tools such as Visual Studio Team Services.

8. Select the appropriate services

This is a necessary yet challenging skill. The cloud is made up of various services; in Azure, there are over 90 core services, each with a unique set of features. You must select the appropriate services from among these to run your application, store your data, protect your app, and so on.

Even if you are not a software architect, you should understand why you should choose one service over another. You might begin by considering how much control you require. To execute your software, you may need to be able to connect into a VM and update registry settings. Or perhaps you’re content to let the cloud platform handle everything. The answer will determine which service category you want to use and filter the services available to you.

There are numerous other factors to consider while selecting the best services for your applications. You may learn more about Microsoft Azure for Developers. How to Use Of course, you should browse through the Azure service categories (data, security, monitoring, and so on). And choose the ones that are most suited to your needs.

9. Concentrate on constructing things that matter while the cloud handles the plumbing.

This may be the most critical skill to have when designing cloud-based applications. As developers, we want to be able to create and control things. Some people may feel motivated to develop their own object relational mappers, logging systems, and even compilers. Make use of the cloud’s technology for heavy lifting such as authentication, data movement, scaling, alerting, and other duties. When you use cloud capabilities, you have more time to produce things that offer value to your users.