Adding Azure Boards in GCC High? - gcc

So, I'm working in an enviornment that utilizes GCC High/365 Gov't Community Cloud High. I haven't seen any documentation online (or I could be missing it entirely) on if it can support Azure boards? We'd love to set up an Azure Board for our company branches to more effectively communicate, along with general bug reporting and issue tracking. Does GCC High support Azure Boards?

This isn't currently supported, see this article and this community post.
Glad to see you in Developer Community!
Azure Devops service is not supported for GCC High accounts. As per
our doc mentioned below:
Ensure you're using Azure AD Public. Connecting Azure DevOps Services
organizations to Azure AD Government and accessing Azure DevOps
Services with user accounts from Azure AD Government isn't supported.

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Microsoft Teams and Azure DevOps integration versioning

I am investigating why I cannot set up a hook to integrate Teams and Azure DevOps. I am running two versions in different environments for comparison- but I am trying to hook the two together in the same environment.
First environment, version 1.3.00: This has the app built-in for Azure DevOps to hook and connect with Teams
Second environment, version 1.2.00: This version has no 'manage apps' button, and does not have anything referencing Azure DevOps or allowing to make any connection between Azure and Teams. This is the environment I am trying to make the connection in.
Any thoughts on this? Does 1.2.00 version not offer the hook between Teams and Azure DevOps? We do not have O365 accounts for this environment.
To access the Manage apps page, you must be a global admin or Teams service admin. You may check your permission. Also, add microsoft-teams tag for you case may help you get more assistance.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-apps

Azure Resource Manager: The Future of Cloud Services

I am currently working heavily in Azure. I am actually quite fond of ARM (Azure Resource Manager) right now and would love to keep using it. Right now in the old portal, We have a lot of resources tied up as Cloud Services. Now, I know cloud services are available in the new portal, but it seems that Microsoft is moving away from the classic cloud service model. Can someone explain if this is true? If so, what will the new model look like? I already use resources groups to manage Websites (WebApps), so I assume this is where the azure future lies. Will we see the "deprecation" of cloud services on down the line?
I am trying to understand if I need to begin re-structuring my Azure Infrastructure.
Any insight, explanation, or documentation is greatly appreciated.
So there are two things here - Cloud Services and managemenet of Cloud Services.
When you manage Cloud Services in current portal the underlying mechanism used is Azure Service Management (ASM) where as it is Azure Resource Manager (ARM) in the preview portal. To me, ARM is the new way of managing your Cloud resources in Azure (including Cloud Services).
I don't work for Microsoft so I would not know if Cloud Services themselves will be deprecated down the road or not but one thing I think will happen is that ASM will be deprecated in favor of ARM. At some point of time, the only option you will be left with managing your cloud resources will be through Azure Resource Manager. One example that makes me believe this thing is the presence of Classic resource providers (e.g. Classic Storage Resource Provider which enables you to manage storage accounts created in current portal via ASM in the preview portal which works exclusively on ARM).
Personally I can't see a place for cloud services in the new ARM world of Azure. I have always found them a convoluted concept that simply added complexity to a deployment.
In the ARM view of deployments servers are collected together in a VNet, and each server is attached to a Nic which in turn can be connected to the internet. A security group then takes care of ingress / egress rules.
This is a much cleaner deployment method, as it puts connectivity configuration at the server layer instead of mapping them all through a higher layer of abstraction.
I don't see the place of cloud services in ARM, however after a quick search it seems that there is a plan to implement it
Still no direction from the Azure Advisers group other than officially they will not drop support for Cloud Services. I think they are nearing giving us some kind of direction but I can't say anymore than that.
I asked a question about the future of Cloud Services on the recent Azure Compute AMA.
You can read the answers directly on Reddit for all details, below are a few interesting quotes (emphasis mine).
On ARM Integration for Cloud Services:
We are looking at ways to make the transition to ARM easier for Cloud Service customers- one of those options includes CS integration in ARM. This investigation is in the very early stages though, so if you are looking for a solution soon, check out VMSS/ACS/SF/Web Apps (meagan-msft)
And:
I think it's safe to say that if we make any significant investment in CS in the near future, it would be ARM integration, and as Meagan suggests, that's still in planning. Beyond that, there are no major feature improvements on the horizon. We believe the platform is pretty mature at this point. (seanmichaelmckenna)
So it doesn't look like any major innovations will hit Cloud Services soon, however:
Cloud Services are not going anywhere. In fact, many Microsoft services run on Cloud Services, so we heavily rely on them as well. They are fully supported, so feel free to continue to use them.
(meagan-msft)
For those who want to switch to a different Compute service, these recommendations were made:
However, if you would like to check out other services that are integrated with ARM today, we recommend checking out the following:
Web Apps for customers who want a fully managed platform and are building traditional web applications
Service Fabric for customers who want an opinionated application platform and managed infrastructure, but still need some control over the IAAS layer
VM Scale Sets for customers who need IaaS-level control with easy scaling, autoscale and load balancer integration
Azure Container service was also listed as a potential alternative.
Some things to consider (my understanding):
Service Fabric currently (2017) requires at least 5 VM instances, except for dev/test purposes. So probably only an option for larger services
VM Scale Sets is an IaaS offering, i.e. you have to manage OS updates etc. yourself. However, support for automatic OS updates is being worked on.

Azure Caching Platform Options - What Are The Alternatives?

I'm currently building a site that will be hosted in Microsoft Azure. The last site I created in this hosting environment used "Windows Azure Shared Caching". Some of you may already be aware that "Windows Azure Shared Caching" service will soon be deprecated over the next year.
I have applied for the preview release of "Windows Azure Cache". However, I'm finding that my request is still "queued".
I wouldn't mind using "Windows Azure Shared Caching" since the site I'm building will only be live for around 10 weeks and the fact it being deprecated next year doesn't worry me. However, I am unable to create a new caching service through the old Azure Management Portal since new caching has to be done using "Windows Azure Cache".
So my question...
Since my application for the new caching platform is still yet to be approved and I am unable to create a new caching service under the old platform, what other options are there? Have I missed something?
Microsoft is surely making things difficult.
The other option you have is using In-Role Cache for Web/Worker roles (Azure Cloud Services). Any role within the same cloud deployment can access the cache. If you have just 1 web role - this acts very similar to ASP.NET State Server which provides an in-memory cache. However, as you add more web roles - you can choose to distribute this in-memory cache across all roles or use a dedicate worker role for managing the cache.
Dedicated In-Role Cache: worker role uses all available memory
Co-Located In-Role Cache: percentage of available memory is used across all roles
See In-Role Cache FAQ on MSDN for more details.
Your request should have been approved (irrespective of whether yours is a paid/trial/free subscription). If it still hasn't, put the query up here. This is the forum for Cache.
This is a proper release of the Cache Service! The core is very mature and Microsoft is giving great support on top of it. Go ahead and use it!
This flavor of Cache is THE right one for Azure Websites.
Leave a post at the forum for any concerns/issues you have. It is being constantly monitored and replied to.
I guess I am the first to suggest Azure Redis Caching?

Cloud Mangement for Amazon IaaS

I am planning to migrate few products on Cloud which will be used as a platform for the developer community. In short I am trying to host PaaS vendor for my products which can be consumed by developers for build and development process.
The plan is as below:
I am trying to use Amazon IaaS ( S3, EC2) as the hardware.
I will require a cloud management software which can be installed somewhere on one of my local systems and can manage the Amazon cloud.
I will deploy all my products on the Amazon Cloud with the help of the Cloud Management Software.
I will develop and provide APIs to my end users(developer community) to use my service as a PaaS.
What I am trying to achieve is as follows:
Vendor independence in terms of IaaS. Lets say tomorrow I move to another IaaS provider.
Customer support for the cloud management software.
Ease of setup and use for the cloud management software.
Evaluation so far:
I tried looking at Eucalyptus and it sounds promising, but I am still not able to find out if this will be supporting the public cloud setup as my requirement is. I believe this is more like a private cloud setup.
If anyone can help me compare the other available options, that would help me solving my issue. For e.g. RightScale, OpenStack, CloudStack, Nimbula etc.
There are several PaaS providers out there. There is a comparison here: Looking for PaaS providers recommendations
Disclaimer: I work for GigaSpaces, developing the Cloudify open-source PaaS stack.
Cloudify answers most of your requirements, especially vendor independence - it supports a large number of IaaS providers, including: EC2, HP, Rackspace, Azure and others.
Cloudify does require its management server to run in the same cloud as the applications it runs so it can collect monitoring information using private communications rather then over the internet. Why do you want to run your management server on-premise?

Code specifically for Azure?

I heard that apps don’t port directly and they have to be specifically written to work with Azure. I’m new to Azure and did some reading but I don’t see anything from their site or documentation that suggests that you must specifically code for Azure, so is it true?
If this question is better suited for another StackExchange site please let me know.
You should take a look at the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit to see some introductory project labs.
While you theoretically can just "drop in" some apps into a Windows Azure VM, it hardly makes sense to do so. Some apps can be migrated with only minor changes, such as an asp.net website - session state is easily handled by AppFabric Cache, and the Web Role VM is Windows Server 2008 with Full IIS. However, you'd still need to integrate with Windows Azure Diagnostics, to be able to have external visibility to the health of your app.
Further, with the example above, there are more optimal things you can do, such as moving static content to blob storage, and taking load off your VMs. This requires you to upload this content, and then change your IMG and other tag URLs to point to a slightly-different URL.
Just remember that you're moving to Windows Azure to take advantage of its platform and related services, not just to be a rack to host a server. To take advantages of these services, you're going to have to target them specifically, such as:
Access control services
Caching
Connectivity (vpn, service bus)
Diagnostics
Database (SQL Azure)
Synchronization services
Traffic management across data centers
This is somewhat true. Your apps will typically run as-is. You just need to add an azure project to the solution, and add your MVC apps as roles to the Azure Project.
I found O'Reilly's "Programming Windows Azure" to be a good conceptual introduction to Azure.

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