Azure Cloud Service VS Azure Resource Manager

Hello Folks,

I’m back! after some unplanned time off, I’m back on CANITPRO.NET. so this morning, I was thinking what will i write about…. Hmmmm… Well just as I was pondering that weekly dilemma, a friend of mine walks by and said:

“I was reading your DevOps Basics series of posts and something the Infrastructure as Code article puzzled me. We used to define VMs and Virtual networks inside a ‘Cloud Service’. In the article you keep referring to ‘Azure Recourse Groups’…. What’s the difference??”

Well that’s all I needed….. What is the difference???

Cloud Service

Cloud Services as defined in the “classic Portal” are containers in which you can deploy Web Applications, VMs, Virtual networks…. They are designed to support applications that are scalable, reliable, and cheap to operate.

As the figure below shows, all of the VMs in a single application run in the same cloud service. Because of this, users access the application through a single public IP address, with requests automatically load balanced across the application's VMs. The platform will scale and deploy the VMs in a Cloud Services application in a way that avoids a single point of hardware failure.  

However, you still have to manage each part inside the cloud service individually…

Azure Resource Manager Overview

Azure Resource Manager is the tools/process we use to manage Resource groups. They are a new concept in the Azure Preview portal. Think of them as “lifecycle boundaries,” because when resources share a resource group, their lifecycles (from create, to update, to delete) are managed as one.

You can use resource groups to collect and manage all your application resources (VMs, IP address, storage accounts, . Link resources across resource groups, share resources across lifecycle boundaries, and manage costs. View, monitor, and track your usage and billing for all the resources your application uses. New visuals show you every resource in the group, including any resources that are linked across groups.

Here is a quick little video that summarizes that.

I hope this helps! the Azure Resource Manager model adds a lot of functionality to the equation. be sure to look it up.

Cheers!

Pierre Roman
@pierreroman