As part of our blog series Getting Started with Azure – Solutions You can Deploy in 10 Minutes or Less, we show you how to build a data-driven app.
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Microsoft’s Azure offers developers every kind of cloud service they could hope for to turn their dreams of app dominance into reality.
That’s because Azure’s data storage, processing, and analysis capabilities have made it possible for developers to focus more on the apps themselves, and less on the infrastructure required to run them.
Today, a developer can create an app in weeks (if not days, thanks to streamlined development tools), and turn to Azure services like SQL Database, Azure Storage, and Azure Power BI to not only store, process, and serve the data their app draws on, but to analyse it for hints on how to improve, as well as provision additional resources on the fly as usage patterns fluctuate.
Azure’s SQL Database service is perfect for developers who focus on on data-driven apps, as it delivers dynamically-scalable performance, columnstore indexes for extreme analytic analysis, and high-performance in-memory online transactional processing capabilities – all the heavy-lifting a developer’s own datacentre would have to provide to sustain their apps.
Microsoft ensures that SQL Database delivers these functions with near-zero administration required from developers, instead doing all of the patching and maintenance on their end.
Best of all, SQL Database automatically provides predictable performance with varying SLAs, and scales dynamically according to the app’s usage, optimises data flows and performance, while also providing global availability thanks to the Azure datacentres dotted around the globe. South Africa’s own Azure presence is scheduled to go online in 2019.
To get started with your own set of Azure services for your data-driven app, all you need to do is follow Microsoft’s Quick Start tutorial to deploy your own SQL database in Azure.
The steps are:
- Log into the Azure portal
- Create your SQL database
- Specify your required settings
- Choose your preferred pricing tier
- Set the number of required DTUs and storage capacity
- Create a server-level firewall rule
- Query the SQL database
- Clean up resources
- Use the database with your favourite tools
Microsoft covers all of the above steps in considerable detail in its SQL Database Quick Start Tutorial, which you can find here.
For a technical overview of Azure’s SQL Database service, click here.
You can also contact the Azure experts at Tarsus On Demand to answer any questions you might have around developing your own data-driven apps using Azure’s extensive capabilities.
