In this episode of Azure Friday, John Downs joins Scott Hanselman to discuss how to design, architect, and build multitenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions on Azure. If you’re building a SaaS product or another multitenant service, there’s a lot to consider when you want to ensure high performance, tenant isolation, and managing deployments. They walk through some example SaaS architectures and see how Microsoft provides guidance to help you to build a multitenant solution on top of Azure.
John Downs, Paolo Salvatori, and Paul Burpo have created a great video on architecting multitenant solutions on Azure. Multitenant architectures bring along some unique challenges and opportunities that they go into and provide guidance on how to do this in Azure and what to do vs avoid.
This video is aimed at developers and architects who are building multitenant or SaaS applications, including startups and ISVs.
Architecture diagrams are a great way to communicate your design, deployment, topology or simply to be used for training decks, documentation, books and videos.
When it comes to Azure icons there are a few resources available to you, but keep in mind that Microsoft reserves the right to not allow certain uses of these symbols, stop their use, or ask for their removal from use regardless of the source.
Microsoft Azure Cloud and AI Symbol / Icon Set – SVG
This package contains a set of symbols/icons to visually represent resources for Microsoft Azure and related cloud and on-premises technologies. Once downloaded, you can drag and drop the SVG files into PowerPoint or Visio and other tools that accept SVG format, and you don’t need to import anything into Visio.
The latest version at the time of this post is v2019.9.11 and was updated September 19, 2019 and only contains SVG image files now.
If you’re familiar with draw.io (soon to be renamed to diagrams.net), then your in luck as there is an icon pack for Microsoft Azure cloud resources. These are the same images that were originally created by Microsoft.
With the Amazing Icon Downloader extension for Chrome or the new Microsoft Edge (chromium based), you can easily find and download SVG icons from the Azure portal.
When you’re in the Azure portal the extension will activate and automatically show you all the icons present for the view your in. As you will see some of the icons are named and so are easy to search for, however other icons have the following naming convention FxSymbol0-097 for example.
The icons are designed to be simple so that you can easily incorporate them in your diagrams and put them in your whitepapers, presentations, datasheets, posters, or any technical material.
Until recently I mostly used the Microsoft Azure Cloud and AI Symbol / Icon Set. Although it seems to be updated on a yearly basis, I find it still lags in keeping up with the changes happening in Azure. Since I like using the current Azure icons, I prefer using the Amazing Icon Downloader as I’m usually in the Azure Portal working with a particular resource and its quick to just grab that icon.
If you know of any other resources please let me know and I’ll update this list.
In this episode of Azure Friday, Aman Bhardwaj and Yaron Schneider join Scott Hanselman to talk about the actor model of Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr). Dapr is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, microservice stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.
In this espisode of Azure Friday, Aman Bhardwaj and Yaron Schneider join Scott Hanselman to talk about the core concepts of Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr). Dapr is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, microservice stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.
Azure provides a lot of messaging solutions and it can become overwhelming for architects and developers to know when to use which server and for what use case. In this talk, Bahram Banisadr will show real life scenarios, code and discuss architecture patterns for messaging and events using Azure Event Hubs, Service Bus, Event Grid, and Storage Queues.
When planning and designing a cloud solution, the location of the service and its data is of great consideration in terms of datasovereignty .
In my experiences when discussing cloud design, I may bring up an Azure service for consideration that is beyond the standard VM, storage account, app service but something complements or supplements the solution like azure app insights, power bi premium/embedded, backups, CDN, logging or an azure ad tenant. Now, can we simply assume they will be available in the desired region? No necessarily. To check we can go to an online tool Products available by region
An example looks as follows:
One thing to point out and be aware are services that are located in Non-regional.
Non-regional is defined as “where there is no dependency on a specific Azure region”
Some examples are CDN, Azure AD, Azure MFA, Traffic manager, Power BI Embedded…
Updated Aug. 28, 2019 – The latest version of this download is v5.6.2019 and was updated May 15, 2019. If you already have these templates you should update to the latest.
The Microsoft Azure, Cloud and Enterprise Symbol / Icon Set is a free download from Microsoft which provides a set of resources to represent features of and systems that use Microsoft Azure and related cloud and on-premises technologies.
The download comes with Visio stencils, along with PNG and SVG images.
Download the ZIP file by clicking the Download button and saving the file to your hard disk.
Remove any previous versions of the symbol set so you can avoid duplicate and deprecated symbols.
Extract the contents of the ZIP file to a separate directory. If you intend to use the Visio stencils, we suggest the My Shapes directory.
Open the instructions and read it to get started.
Open the .vss, vsd or .svg files with Microsoft Visio. Open the PNG directory by extracting the contents to a folder and browsing the contents of the folder. Drag and drop or open a PNG file in your drawing application. Load SVGs into any app that accepts them. Visio will open SVGs.
Note: The website for the download mentions support for PowerPoint. Their originally was a PowerPoint file that came with the file download but that has since been deprecated as it’s just as easy to add images to PowerPoint
The Flying Maverick 