Overview

Microsoft Azure Resource Manager is Microsoft's application platform for the public cloud - it is the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Microsoft Azure platform. It provides developers with on-demand compute, storage, bandwidth, content delivery, middleware, and marketplace capabilities to build, host, and scale web applications through Microsoft data centers.

Understanding the various components of Microsoft Azure Resource Manager is helpful when making decisions about how to build and manage your cloud and for seeing the value of using RightScale + Microsoft Azure for this purpose. The three main components of Microsoft Azure are Web Sites, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines.

Introduction to Microsoft Azure Resource Manager

Microsoft Azure Resource Manager is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. Microsoft Azure is built to support open technologies with any OS, language, database, or tool. Comprehensive networking capabilities connect on-premise infrastructure to Azure as well as integrated IaaS and PaaS on a shared network. Microsoft offers rock solid service with a 99.95% monthly SLA and global footprint of 6 data centers.

Introduction to RightScale

RightScale is the leading cloud management platform, supporting Microsoft Azure Resource Manager and a range of public and private clouds. RightScale has more than 80,000 users and has launched over 9 million servers including many of the largest production deployments and scaling events in public and private clouds.

RightScale provides complete lifecycle management for public and private cloud-based applications including provisioning, monitoring, configuration, automation, auditing, and governance. This enables efficient administration with a single view of multiple cloud accounts’ usage, resources, and role-based access controls. RightScale is a multi-cloud solution, making it easy to migrate workloads into and out of public and private clouds, with consistent governance, monitoring, and automation, and to construct hybrid and multi-data center environments for large organizations, distributed applications, and high availability. In addition, RightScale offers services including consultative support, business critical SLAs, onboarding services, and end-to-end engineering that has advised the cloud’s cutting edge deployments.

Key RightScale Concepts

RightScale Cloud Management is the bridge between your applications and your cloud infrastructure. The MultiCloud Platform provides a universal remote to conveniently access your public, private, and hybrid cloud resource pools from one Dashboard and API. The Configuration Framework provides intelligent cloud blueprints to configure and operate your servers in a dynamic and completely customizable fashion. The MultiCloud Marketplace™ provides a one-stop shop of cloud-ready components. The Automation Engine gives you the power to provision, monitor, scale, and manage entire server deployments efficiently and reliably. Governance Controls allow you to keep watch over access, security, auditing, reporting, and budgeting through a “single pane of glass” view.

Use Cases

Windows-based

Microsoft Azure Resource Manager provides extensive support for .Net, IIS, SQL Server, Active Directory, and other Windows-based applications.

Highly available

Microsoft Azure Resource Manager offers a global footprint of data centers that the offer geographic coverage, redundancy, and capacity to host mission critical, highly available applications.

Highly scalable

From big data analytics to gaming, SaaS, and websites, Microsoft Azure is well suited to run highly scalable applications.

MultiCloud Platform

RightScale Cloud Management enable management of all of your clouds — Microsoft Azure, other public clouds, and private clouds — and all of your resources — compute, storage, and networking. Cloud-specific differences are abstracted so you can focus on running your applications. All of your resources are in one place and are organized for ease with logical groups of servers called deployments. Provision, configure, and automate individual servers or entire deployments in minutes. All of your resources are accessible from the RightScale Dashboard and API.

Configuration Framework

The RightScale configuration framework — the ServerTemplate™ — is the key to efficient, automated provisioning and operations on Microsoft Azure Resource Manager and other public and private clouds. ServerTemplates are built from modular images, scripts, and variable inputs. ServerTemplates are dynamic, provisioning your servers at boot time using your chosen configuration and variable inputs. Dynamic configuration ensures that your servers are provisioned in context — they automatically register with the correct load balancers and databases, begin backups with the proper frequencies and storage locations, and much more.

The modular and dynamic aspects of ServerTemplates enable them to be completely customizable, from the inputs all the way down to the images. Each element of a ServerTemplate is version controlled, providing reproducible behavior across time and infrastructure, so that you design once and then consistently deploy multiple times on multiple clouds. ServerTemplates abstract cloud-specific differences, ensuring consistent multi-cloud configuration across public, private, and hybrid cloud resource pools.

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The RightScale MultiCloud Marketplace™ offers ServerTemplates™, scripts, and architectures published by RightScale, our partners, and our users. All of these pre-built configurations are fully customizable and provide a huge variety of solutions to get started. Swap scripts and recipes in or out and change default inputs and alerts. ServerTemplates and components published by RightScale are rigorously tested, version controlled, and backed by our support.

Automation Engine

The RightScale automation engine provides powerful tools to make cloud resources efficient, elastic, and highly available. Keep tabs on your resources with granular Server and Application Monitoring. View entire systems of hundreds of servers with Cluster Monitoring. Link monitors to Alerts and Escalations that notify you of issues and automatically take action. Scale resources up and down according to your needs with Auto-Scaling Arrays. Stand up entire architectures using Deployment Orchestration. Perform Application and Database Automation with powerful tools such as tags and our customizable library of scripts.

Governance Controls

Manage access and usage of cloud resources with a comprehensive set of RightScale governance controls. Control authentication, permissions, and credentials with the Access and Security Manager. Create secure environments for multiple teams with Enterprise Manager and Federated Identity. Resolve issues and trace events with Auditing.

Services & Support

RightScale has been a provider of leading services and support for public and private clouds since 2006. RightScale offers a range of services to help you succeed, from do-it-yourself materials to white glove engineering. Onboarding services provide you with invaluable assistance getting cloud projects up and running on time. Round-the-clock support keeps your applications running. In-depth training offers insights into using RightScale, cloud-based applications, and adopting cloud best practices.

Conclusion

Using RightScale to manage your Microsoft Azure Resource Mananger cloud gives you maximum control and flexibility by integrating all of your cloud management into one interface. Using Microsoft Azure with RightScale provides you with the following benefits:

  • Manage your entire Microsoft Azure Resource Mananger cloud infrastructure with a single, integrated solution using RightScale.
  • Use RightScale abstraction with customization so you can focus on your applications running in Microsoft Azure rather than on administration.
  • Automate deployment and management of cloud resources.
  • Build and manage your cloud by leveraging the expertise of both the RightScale and Microsoft Azure teams.
  • Provision and monitor your servers in the Internet-scale hosting environment provided by Microsoft Azure Resource Mananger, using RightScale as a single pane of glass management interface.

Support

Contact RightScale Support at support@rightscale.com.