We participated in the Azure study group [Co-hosted by Microsoft] [Beyond Study Group]

Hello.
I'm Mandai, the Wild team member in charge of development.

On October 28, 2020, Beyond hosted a study session.
It was called the Beyond Study Session.
This time, it was co-hosted with Microsoft, and we were fortunate to have a speaker from Microsoft, making it a truly special event.

What kind of study group is the Beyond Study Group?

Beyond Study Group is not a study group specializing in a particular field, but rather a general-interest study group that covers whatever topic interests us at the time.
This time, we focused on Azure, provided by Microsoft, which has recently become a prominent public cloud service, an area in which Beyond excels.

I boldly asked him to speak, and he gladly accepted

 

First announcement: "Notifying Azure Monitor alerts to various communication tools"

The first presenter was Hirata from the System Solutions Department at Beyond, our company.
His presentation involved using Azure Monitor to send notifications to various communication tools.

While email alert notifications are available by default, they're practically relics of the past as a communication tool.
Now that communication using chat tools like Slack and Chatwork has become commonplace, let's try receiving alerts via chat as well.

One interesting feature was the call processing using Twilio, a service that can handle making and receiving phone calls and SMS

Everything can be driven by Azure Automation, and I was impressed by how powerful the service is and how flexible it can be

A video showing the machine in operation has also been released, so please enjoy it

Watch the video here: Notifying various communication tools of Azure Monitor alerts [Beyond Study Group #29] - YouTube
here available

 

Next presentation: "Load testing of AppService and Azure Database for MySQL"

Next, from the development side, Hase from our System Development Department gave a presentation on load testing of a web application running on Azure App Service, a PaaS.
Some of you may be wondering, "Load testing for a PaaS?" While load testing does serve to prove that the expected load can be handled, it is also important to determine in advance what load a given configuration can handle.
In this case, since the expected number of users was known, the main purpose was to measure the resources required to handle that number of users and to find the line at which stable operation could be achieved.

When load testing doesn't yield the expected results, the first thing to suspect is SQL, right?
This time, too, we didn't get satisfactory results at first, so we went through a lot of trial and error.
The process of figuring out how to proceed was explained step by step, and the final results were very insightful.

Watch the video here: Load testing of App Service and Azure Database for MySQL [Beyond Study Group #29] - YouTube
here available

 

Finally, Microsoft gave a presentation on "Azure infrastructure reliability and governance, which have evolved significantly over the past three years."

Finally, we had Mr. Masubuchi from Microsoft, who holds the title of Global Black Belt Game Server Architect, take the stage. His presentation
covered a wide range of topics in the Azure world, but I was taken aback when he suddenly started talking about space.

They want me to talk about Azure.
They want me to talk about the product.

This wasn't just because we wanted to talk about space, but because we were talking about Azure's space business, Azure Orbital

From there, let's move on to Azure, which we're all familiar with

The basics were just glossed over and I was told to read the documentation, but the site that was introduced was very well-designed

Developer tools, technical documentation, and code samples | Microsoft Docs

Microsoft's documentation has often been rather difficult to understand, but this is very well organized. What
I found amazing is that you can try it out using actual Azure instances.
You can try out various things for free, so reading through this and trying it out will likely deepen your understanding considerably.

The second half of the session focused on Azure infrastructure reliability.
We were given an overview of how Azure services are managed.
In particular, the discussion of availability sets, failure domains, and update domains were noteworthy as they are distinctive features of Azure, and I felt that understanding these concepts would be extremely useful when building systems.

Continuing from the SLA topic, the conversation quickly moved on to storage and PaaS (AppService WebApp).
There was a wealth of useful information, such as the updated AppService backend with improved specifications and the Application Insights feature, which is convenient for reviewing processing speed.

He shared a lot of insight into large-scale projects that are unique to Microsoft (especially in the gaming industry, which is Masubuch's specialty), including the promotion of in-memory SQL Server, the behind-the-scenes of Minecraft Earth, which uses Cosmos DB, the weaknesses of Cosmos DB that were discovered there, and how to choose Azure Synapse Analytics as a workaround

There's so much to cover that I've had to summarize it all, so it's best to just take a look at the publicly available archives

Watch the video here: Azure Infrastructure Reliability and Governance: A Huge Evolution in the Last 3 Years [Beyond Study Session #29] - YouTube
Slides here: Azure Infrastructure Reliability and Governance

 

summary

This study session featured presentations on Azure from both service users and service providers.
Those who regularly use other public cloud services likely found many points of interest.

At Beyond, we hold study sessions on a wide range of topics, including infrastructure as well as development

Please register for study sessions via connpass or doorkeeper. We
recommend registering as a member of each community so you can quickly check for upcoming study sessions.

Beyond Study Group - connpass
Beyond Study Group | Doorkeeper

lastly

I have launched "SEKARAKU Lab," a service site for the system development company I belong to.
Beyond offers a one-stop service from server design and construction to operation, so please feel free to contact us if you have any problems with server-side development.
SEKARAKU Lab:[https://sekarakulab.beyondjapan.com/](https://sekarakulab.beyondjapan.com/)
That's all.