Azure and Jet- Awesome Much?

limits, network attached storage and more, to impact system behavior.

The Expected

Azure wouldn't be Azure without a good dose of Microsoft middleware available as a service. The leader is of course SQL Azure, which is basically SQL Server as a service. Although early incarnations had considerable feature set divergence from SQL Server proper, the gap is narrowing quickly and we are quite happy at Jet to move a lot of our relational workloads over to SQL Azure. As I mentioned with the basics above, it took us a while to engineer around the fact that you can’t always just add more hardware, but in the longer run not having to run our own SQL Server machines is a huge win for us.

As you would expect, Azure has good support for most services and components that comprise a large scale system. Some of the key ones we rely on at Jet are:

Azure Redis: Does what it says on the tin. Just don’t try use it as a database. It’s a cache (a lesson we had to learn a couple of times!)

Azure Websites (aka Web Apps): Again, does what it says on the tin, but this time so much more. This is basically IIS and Kudu working together to host web sites. At Jet we run all our front-end Node.js web sites on this service along with a lot of our back end APIs. It has some really nice features that allow fast auto scaling, load balancing, multi data center operations (in combination with Azure Traffic manager), diagnostics, and continuous deployment from Git and other products.

Azure Service Bus: Like any good scalable system, at Jet we use a lot of message bus and queuing patterns in our platform (our whole platform is largely event based in fact). Service Bus and Azure Queues do the trick here very reliably.

The Unexpected

One of the things that has taken us by surprise with Azure is the pace of innovation. In what is a very competitive space, where its likely only a couple of winners will remain standing in the next decade, Microsoft has clearly thrown off the shackles of a staid corporate behemoth and are innovating like a group of startup engineers with fire in their belly. We have seen countless new features, tools and services come online in the last 18 months and the 2016 roadmap looks just as exciting. This pace of innovation has definitely allowed Jet to take on some tech debt in some of our systems, comfortable in the knowledge that it will be paid down quite quickly when the requisite Azure service comes on stream.

The most cogent example of this is with respect to provisioning resources in Azure. When we first started Azure didn’t have the APIs, SDKs and templates to allow us to really define our topologies of services and resources in a declarative way. To create a truly idempotent set of scripts and definitions that represented our environment was impossible. At some point we always ended up having to back to the portal to tweak some feature or push a button. However, after a lot of work with the Azure team, within 12 months this problem had largely abated. We can now spin up pretty much anything we need in an “infrastructure as code” way.

In Summary

Clearly I have only had room to scratch the surface of our experience with Azure, but on the whole I would said it was extremely positive. Although it took some work, we went from a few raised eyebrows in the early days to a good appreciation of what the platform can really do some 12 months later.