Migrating a Two-Tier Application to Azure

Chapter 1: Digital Transformation OverviewThis chapter provides an introduction to "digital transformation" and how public cloud environments like Azure can help with that. You learn about business benefits in moving to public cloud such as high availability, scalability, security, and governance.

Chapter 2: Automating Azure Deployments Using ARM Templates
In this chapter, you will learn the core concepts of automated deployments of Azure resources, using ARM Templates. Starting from a preconfigured set of templates allowing deploying the baseline of the hands-on exercises, you also learn about optimizing ARM templates for virtual machine (VM) configuration management using PowerShell Desired State Configuration and Azure VM custom script extensions.

Chapter 3: Performing Azure Assessments
A successful cloud migration of existing on-premises workloads starts with performing proper assessments. Azure has several tools helping with this process, to identify virtual machine supportability, as well as web applications and SQL Server databases. This chapter guides readers through different assessment tools, reflecting in another hands-on exercise on how to effectively use them to prepare a lift-and-shift migration to Azure.

Chapter 4: Deploying Azure SQL as a Service
After performing the recommended assessments, this chapter will detail the aspects of deploying and running SQL Server database in an Azure SQL Platform as a service architecture. Starting from the different topologies available, such as Azure SQL Single Instance, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Elastic Pools, we will also touch on the actual migration of a traditional VM-based SQL Server database to Azure SQL in this chapter.

Chapter 5: Deploying and Running Web Apps in Azure Application Services
Azure App services is the overall service allowing for running web apps, mobile apps, API apps, and Azure Function apps. Going back to our original running web application, the goal of this chapter is migrating this workload to Azure Web Apps. Before performing the actual migration and deployment, you will learn about several core Web App capabilities and features, such as deployment slots, integrated backup, high availability architecture, and load balancing. The exercise in this chapter covers several situations, starting from a Visual Studio web deploy, simulating a greenfield deployment, as well as guiding you through a lift-and-shift migration process using Azure App Services Assessment tool.

Chapter 6: Containerizing Web Applications Using Docker
In the previous chapters, you learned about running an existing two-tier workload to Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as well as migrating to Platform as a Service (PaaS). In this chapter and the next, we reuse the same application architecture, but moving it into a containerized architecture. Starting from the basics of Docker, you will practice the base Docker commands, as well as get guided through the configuration parameters in a Dockerfile. Next, we will take you to the Azure services allowing for running Docker containers, such as Azure Container Registry, Azure WebApp for Containers, and Azure Container Instance.

Chapter 7: Deploying and Running Containerized Workloads in Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)
As you learned by now, Azure offers several container-supporting services. While they do a really good job in providing adequate performance, ease of use and nice integration with other Azure services, you might also consider running the containers in a Kubernetes environment for several reasons. Starting from the base characteristics of Kubernetes and how it differs from other Azure container-supporting services, you will learn how to deploy an AKS cluster, how to manage