Microsoft Azure integration with elastic dynamic deployment
Scale up and down Azure using ProActive resource manager
2 min
Jun 12, 2019 from Activeeon
In a few years time, Microsoft has become a major public cloud provider thanks to Microsoft Azure. Indeed, 3 key figures reflect the market reality:
- Microsoft currently provides more than 70 types of certifications,
- 95% of the Fortune 500 companies have adopted Microsoft Azure,
- the company is gaining 120k new Azure customer subscriptions per month.
Beyond these figures, companies are adopting flexible cloud computing solutions, mixing on-premisses and public cloud resources, with auto scale up and down.
Microsoft Azure inherits from Microsoft experience in terms of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS provider (resp. Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service), offering a wide range of VMs with preinstalled software, ready to be deployed on the desired computing resources: “You can deploy virtually any workload and any language on nearly any operating system”. Microsoft Azure resources are hosted in data centers spread over geographical regions worldwide, allowing users to reach the standard 99.95% VM Service Level Agreement. Users can manage Azure resources using the Azure web portal, the Azure CLI or the dedicated Azure REST API. Such API greatly eases the Azure integration into third-party software, and Activeeon has adopted this approach to finely interconnect with Azure.
Dynamic deployment with elastic scaling up and down
Activeeon Elastic Dynamic deployment, within ProActive Workflows & Scheduling toolsuite, allows to manage scaling up and down easily and efficiently, even in hybrid cloud setting. Any type of machine can be considered as part of the computing resources, by simply starting a ProActive node on it and connecting it to a running resource manager; a ProActive node is a ProActive abstraction of computing resource that is usually configured to reflect a vCPU in a VM. For Azure-based ProActive nodes, user has the full control on the deployment configuration from the ProActive Resource Manager portal: linux image, auto scale up/down, maximum number of VM, etc. Moreover, to achieve higher efficiency, ProActive directly takes advantage of Azure ARM and Scale Sets, launching at once many Azure VMs.
On the screenshot below we can see the ProActive resource manager scaling up and down Azure VMs using Azure scale sets.
Using this ProActive/Azure integration, easing the deployment of any Azure-based cloud at large scale, it is effortless to activate Azure Availability Zones to benchmark the impact of using multiple zones for the sake of application resilience. This is what we have done in these benchmarks. Furthermore, we are conducting all those benchmarks on a real-world application: a typical financial Use Case, featuring both Compute & IO Intensive tasks.
Learn more about High availability in our benchmarks for Azure Availability Zones.