Boost Your Development with Azure Tools for Visual Studio Code
As the cloud becomes essential for modern software development, integrating cloud solutions into your development process can significantly boost productivity. Microsoft Azure offers a comprehensive suite of services and tools to help developers create, deploy, and manage cloud applications. Using Azure extensions for Visual Studio Code is one of the simplest ways to utilize Azure’s features. This blog post will discuss using the Azure Tools extension pack for Visual Studio Code and the best extensions for various development roles.How managed identities work on Azure resources
Managed Identities are a great way to eliminate the need to store credentials in the source code, and retrieve token from Azure AD while abstracting the entire process for apps running on Azure resources. Learn how it works and what magic happens on the backend!
Modern Application Development Overview
This blog will provide an overview of Modern application development. I will first define the modern application development approach. Then delve into the ‘7 building blocks’ of the approach starting with cloud native architecture, followed by AI, Integration, Data, Software delivery, Operations, and Security. Each segment will define and explain the ‘building block’ and how the modern application development approach leverages the ‘building blocks’ to produce more robust applications. What is Modern Application Development (MAD)? Modern application development is an approach that enables you to innovate rapidly by using cloud-native architectures with loosely coupled microservices, managed databases, AI, DevOps support, and built-in monitoring. The resulting modern applications leverage cloud native architectures by packaging code and dependencies in containers and deploying them as microservices to increase developer velocity using DevOps practices. Subsequently modern applications utilize continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) technologies and processes to improve system reliability. Modern apps employ automation to identify and quickly mitigate issues applying best practices like infrastructure as code and increasing data security with threat detection and protection. Lastly, modern applications are faster by infusing AI into native architecture structures to reduce manual tasks, accelerating workflows and introducing low code application development tools to simplify and expedite development processes. Cloud-native architectures According to The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), cloud native is defined as “Cloud-native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach. These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil.” Utilizing that definition, what are the key tenants of a cloud-native approach, and how does each tenant benefit you? As stated above, cloud-native architectures center on speed and agility. That speed and agility are derived from 6 factors: 1. Cloud infrastructure 2. Modern design 3. Microservices 4. Containers 5. Backing services 6. Automation. Cloud infrastructure is the most important factor that contributes to the speed and agility of cloud-native architecture. 3 Key Factors 1. Cloud-native systems fully leverage the cloud service model using PaaS compute infrastructure and managed services. 2. Cloud-native systems continue to run as infrastructure scales in or out without worrying about the back end because the infra is fully managed. 3. Cloud-native systems have auto scaling, self-healing, and monitoring capabilities. Modern Design is highly effective in part due to the Twelve-Factor Application method, which is a set of principles and practices that developers follow to construct applications optimized for modern cloud environments. Most Critical Considerations for Modern Design 1. Communication — How front ends communication with back-end services, and how back-end services communicate with each other. 2. Resiliency — How services in your distributed architecture respond in less-than-ideal scenarios due to the in-process, out-process network communications of microservices architecture. 3. Distributed Data — How do you query data or implement a transaction across multiple services? 4. Identity — How does your service identify who is accessing it and their allotted permissions? What are Microservices? Microservices are built as a distributed set of small, independent services that interact through a shared fabric. Improved Agility with Microservices 1. Each microservice has an autonomous lifecycle and can evolve independently and deploy frequently. 2. Each microservice can scale independently, enabling services to scale to meet demand. Those microservices are then packaged a container image, those images are stored in container registry. When needed you transform the container into a running container instance, to utilize the stored microservices. How do containers benefit cloud native apps? Benefits of Containers 1. Provide portability and guarantee consistency across environments. 2. Containers can isolate microservices and their dependencies from the underlying infrastructure. 3. Smaller footprints than full virtual machines (VMs). That smaller size increases density, the number of microservices, that a given host can run at a time. Cloud native solutions also increase application speed and agility via backing services. Benefits of Backing Services 1. Save time and labor 2. Treating backing services as attached resources enables the services to attach and detach as needed without code changes to the microservices that contain information, enabling greater dynamism. Lastly, cloud-native solutions leverage automation. Using cloud-native architectures your infrastructure and deployment are automated, consistent, and reputable. Benefits of Automation 1. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) avoids manual environment configuration and delivers stable environments rapidly at scale. 2. Automated deployment leverages CI/CD to speed up innovation and deployment, updating on-demand; saving money and time. Artificial Intelligence The second building block in the modern application development approach is Artificial intelligence (AI). What comprises artificial intelligence? How do I add AI to my applications? Azure Artificial Intelligence is comprised of machine learning, knowledge mining, and AI apps and agents. Under the apps and agent’s domain there are two overarching products, Azure Cognitive Services and Bot Service, that we’re going to focus on. Cognitive services are a collection of domain specific pre-trained AI models that can be customized with your data. Bot service is a purpose-built bot development environment with out-of-the-box templates. To learn how to add AI to your applications watch the short video titled “Easily add AI to your applications.” Innate Benefits User benefits: Translation, chatbots, and voice for AI-enabled user interfaces. Business benefits: Enhanced business logic for scenarios like search, personalization, document processing, image analytics, anomaly detection, and speech analytics. Modern Application Development unique benefit: Enable developers of any skill to add AI capabilities to their applications with pre-built and customizable AI models for speech, vision, language, and decision-making. Integration The third building block is integration. Why is integration needed, and how is it accomplished? Integration is needed to integrate applications by connecting multiple independent systems. The four core cloud services to meet integration needs are: 1. A way to publish and manage application programming interfaces (APIs). 2. A way to create and run integration logic, typically with a graphical tool for defining the workflow’s logic. 3. A way for applications and integration technologies to communicate in a loosely coupled way via messaging. 4. A technology that supports communication via events What are the benefits of Azure integration services and how do they translate to the modern app dev approach? Azure meets all four needs, the first need is met by Azure API management, the second is met by Azure Logic Apps, the third is Azure Service Bus, and the final is met by Azure Event Grid. The four components of Azure Integration Services address the core requirements of application integration. Yet real scenarios often require more, and this is where the modern application development approach comes into play. Perhaps your integration application needs a place to store unstructured data, or a way to include custom code that does specialized data transformations. Azure Integration Services is part of the larger Azure cloud platform, making it easier to integrate data, APIs, and into your modern app to meet your needs. You might store unstructured data in Azure Data Lake Store, for instance, or write custom code using Azure Functions, to meet serverless compute tech needs. Data The fourth building block is data, and more specifically managed databases. What are the advantages of managed databases? Fully managed, cloud-based databases provide limitless scale, low-latency access to rich data, and advanced data protection — all built in, regardless of languages or frameworks. How does the modern application development approach benefit from fully managed databases? Modern application development leverages microservices and containers, the benefit to both technologies is their ability to operate independently and scale as demand warrants. To ensure the greatest user satisfaction and app functionality the limitless scale and low-latency access to data enable apps to run unimpeded. Software Delivery The fifth building block is software delivery. What constitutes modern development software delivery practices? Modern app development software delivery practices enable you to meet rapid market changes that require shorter release cycles without sacrificing quality, stability, and security. The practices help you to release in a fast, consistent, and reliable way by using highly productive tools, automating mundane and manual steps, and iterating in small increments through CI/CD and DevOps practices. What is DevOps? A compound of development (Dev) and operations (Ops), DevOps is the union of people, process, and technology to continually provide value to customers. DevOps enables formerly siloed roles — development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security — to coordinate and collaborate to produce better, more reliable products. By adopting a DevOps culture along with DevOps practices and tools, teams gain the ability to better respond to customer needs, increase confidence in the applications they build, and achieve development goals faster. DevOps influences the application lifecycle throughout its plan, develop, deliver, and operate phases. Plan In the plan phase, DevOps teams ideate, define, and describe features and capabilities of the applications and systems they are building. Creating backlogs, tracking bugs, managing agile software development with Scrum, using Kanban boards, and visualizing progress with dashboards are some of the ways DevOps teams plan with agility and visibility. Develop The develop phase includes all aspects of coding — writing, testing, reviewing, and the integration of code by team members — as well as building that code into build artifacts that can be deployed into various environments. To develop rapidly, they use highly productive tools, automate mundane and manual steps, and iterate in small increments through automated testing and continuous integration. Deliver Delivery is the process of deploying applications into production environments and deploying and configuring the fully governed foundational infrastructure that makes up those environments. In the deliver phase, teams define a release management process with clear manual approval stages. They also set automated gates that move applications between stages until they’re made available to customers. Operate The operate phase involves maintaining, monitoring, and troubleshooting applications in production environments. In adopting DevOps practices, teams work to ensure system reliability, high availability, and aim for zero downtime while reinforcing security and governance. What is CI/CD? Under continuous integration, the develop phase — building and testing code — is fully automated. Each time you commit code, changes are validated and merged to the master branch, and the code is packaged in a build artifact. Under continuous delivery, anytime a new build artifact is available, the artifact is automatically placed in the desired environment and deployed. With continuous deployment, you automate the entire process from code commit to production. Operations The sixth building block is operations to maximize automation. How do you maximize automation in your modern application development approach? With an increasingly complex environment to manage, maximizing the use of automation helps you improve operational efficiency, identify issues before they affect customer experiences, and quickly mitigate issues when they occur. Fully managed platforms provide automated logging, scaling, and high availability. Rich telemetry, actionable alerting, and full visibility into applications and the underlying system are key to a modern application development approach. Automating regular checkups and applying best practices like infrastructure as code and site reliability engineering promotes resiliency and helps you respond to incidents with minimal downtime and data loss. Security The seventh building block is multilayered security. Why do I need multi-layered security in my modern applications? Modern applications require multilayered security across code, delivery pipelines, app runtimes, and databases. Start by providing developers secure dev boxes with well-governed identity. As part of the DevOps lifecycle, use automated tools to examine dependencies in code repositories and scan for vulnerabilities as you deploy apps to the target environment. Enterprise-grade secrets and policy management encrypt the applications and give the operations team centralized policy enforcement. With fully managed compute and database services, security control is built in and threat protection is executed in real time. Conclusion While modern application development can seem daunting, it is an approach that can be done iteratively, and each step can yield large benefits for your team. Access webinars, analyst reports, tutorials, and more on the Modern application development on Azure page.Deliver Java Apps Quickly using Custom Connectors in Power Apps
Overview In 2021, each month we will be releasing a monthly blog covering the webinar of the month for the Low-code application development (LCAD) on Azure solution. LCAD on Azure is a new solution to demonstrate the robust development capabilities of integrating low-code Microsoft Power Apps and the Azure products you may be familiar with. This month’s webinar is ‘Deliver Java Apps Quickly using Custom Connectors in Power Apps’ In this blog I will briefly recap Low-code application development on Azure, how the app was built with Java on Azure, app deployment, and building the app’s front end and UI with Power Apps. What is Low-code application development on Azure? Low-code application development (LCAD) on Azure was created to help developers build business applications faster with less code, leveraging the Power Platform, and more specifically Power Apps, yet helping them scale and extend their Power Apps with Azure services. For example, a pro developer who works for a manufacturing company would need to build a line-of-business (LOB) application to help warehouse employees’ track incoming inventory. That application would take months to build, test, and deploy, however with Power Apps’ it can take hours to build, saving time and resources. However, say the warehouse employees want the application to place procurement orders for additional inventory automatically when current inventory hits a determined low. In the past that would require another heavy lift by the development team to rework their previous application iteration. Due to the integration of Power Apps and Azure a professional developer can build an API in Visual Studio (VS) Code, publish it to their Azure portal, and export the API to Power Apps integrating it into their application as a custom connector. Afterwards, that same API is re-usable indefinitely in the Power Apps’ studio, for future use with other applications, saving the company and developers more time and resources. To learn more, visit the LCAD on Azure page, and to walk through the aforementioned scenario try the LCAD on Azure guided tour. Java on Azure Code In this webinar the sample application will be a Spring Boot application, or a Spring application on Azure, that is generated using JHipster and will deploy the app with Azure App service. The app’s purpose is to catalog products, product descriptions, ratings and image links, in a monolithic app. To learn how to build serverless PowerApps, please refer to last month’s Serverless Low-code application development on Azure blog for details. During the development of the API Sandra used H2SQL and in production she used MySQL. She then adds descriptions, ratings, and image links to the API in a JDS studio. Lastly, she applies the API to her GitHub repository prior to deploying to Azure App service. Deploying the Sample App Sandra leverages the Maven plug-in in JHipster to deploy the app to Azure App service. After providing an Azure resource group name due to her choice of ‘split and deploy’ in GitHub Actions she only manually deploys once, and any new Git push from her master branch will be automatically deployed. Once the app is successfully deployed it is available at myhispter.azurewebsites.net/V2APIdocs, where she copies the Swagger API file into a JSON, which will be imported into Power Apps as a custom connector. Front-end Development The goal of the front-end development is to build a user interface that end users will be satisfied with, to do so the JSON must be brought into Power Apps as a custom connector so end users can access the API. The first step is clearly to import the open API into Power Apps, note that much of this process has been streamlined via the tight integration of Azure API management with Power Apps. To learn more about this tighter integration watch a demo on integrating APIs via API management into Power Apps. After importing the API, you must create a custom connector, and connect that custom connector with the Open API the backend developer built. After creating the custom connector Dawid used Power Apps logic formula language to collect data into a dataset, creating gallery display via the collected data. Lastly, Dawid will show you the data in a finalized application and walk you through the process of sharing the app with a colleague or making them a co-owner. Lastly, once the app is shared, Dawid walks you through testing the app and soliciting user feedback via the app. Conclusion To conclude, professional developers can rapidly build the back and front ends of the application using Java, or any programming language with Power Apps. Fusion development teams, professional developers and citizen developers, can collaborate on apps together, reducing much of the lift for professional developers. Please watch the webinar and complete the survey so, we can improve these blogs and webinars in the future. Resources Webinar Deliver Java Apps Quickly Low-code application development on Azure Low Code Application Development Low-code app dev guided tour Java on Azure resources Java on Azure Java on Azure - Learn Develop Java web app on Azure using Eclipse - Learn Develop Java web app on Azure using Maven - Learn Automate Java container deployments with Azure Pipelines - Learn Deploy Spring microservices to Azure - Learn Power Apps resources Azure plus Power Apps for pro developers Introduction to developing with Power Platform Create components with Power Apps Component Framework Get started using Microsoft DataverseA Deep Dive into Serverless Applications on Power Apps and Azure
This is a monthly blog series highlighting different the capabilities of Azure and Power apps together. Read this blog to learn how Low-code application development on Azure enables you to build serverless applications faster. After reading, scan through the resources section for additional information on serverless applications and Low-code development on Azure.Introducing Microsoft Power Fx: the low-code programming language
Today the Power Platform introduces its open-source language for low-code, Microsoft Power Fx. This formula-based language originates from Microsoft Excel and is already the foundation of the Microsoft Power Apps canvas. You may wonder, why does the world need a low-code programming language? Point-and-click tools are great for quickly assembling experiences and workflows, but many apps need a layer of logic that goes beyond what is practical to drag and drop, for example: Show a list of customers who signed up in the last 7 days within 15 miles of this location. Highlight the newest entries in green. When a user clicks for more details, if the record has outstanding action items associated with it, pop those to the top of the screen. Custom logic traditionally needed to solve such problems is where low-code platforms have “hit a cliff” requiring traditional code, where the Low-code application development on Azure solution has stepped in. Power Fx enables many millions of people globally who build with Microsoft Excel syntax to build custom logic, reducing much of the “cliff”. However, this does not reduce the integration capabilities of Azure and Power Apps but enhances them. Additionally, developers can use Power Fx with tools they are familiar with such as VS (Visual Studio) Code, GitHub, Azure DevOps, and it works with “pro-code” components created in JavaScript, C#, or other professional languages. Developers can cut development time and costs using Power Fx. The complexities of asynchronous coding are taken care of, Dataverse entities and data types are first class objects, and guardrails prevent run away code and other common pitfalls. Read the entire Power Fx announcement here.
