#Azure : Storage Accounts

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Storage is an essential part of anything what you do in your day-to-day life and same applies to technology as well. Microsoft Azure Storage is a managed service provided by Microsoft cloud services. When you use any product or service, availability, resiliency, performance, scalability, durability, pricing, security and delivery play an important role, and here in case of Azure Storage it is all taken care by Microsoft.

Azure Storage provides two type of storage accounts: General Purpose and Blob.

While Azure Storage provides services in the following types:

Blob storage

File storage

Queues storage

Table storage

Disk Storage

Storage accounts and services are tightly integrated with each other. To use any one of the above service, you first create a storage account then you define the storage services based on the storage account type.

First, let understand the Storage accounts by an illustration:

Now, let understand the storage accounts in detail:

General purpose: A general purpose storage account cater all your azure storage services such as Tables, Queues, Files, Blobs and Azure virtual machine disks under a single account. This type of storage account has two performance tiers:

  • Standard storage performance tier: This performance tier fulfills all your data storage needs such as Tables, Queues, Files, Blobs and Azure virtual machine disks. This tier supports block blobs, page blobs and append blobs.
  • Premium storage performance tier: This performance tier is backed by SSDs and provides high performance IOPS, best for virtual machine disks and data intensive applications such as database. This tier supports only page blobs.

Currently, these general-purpose accounts are available in 2 versions.

General purpose v1: It is previous version of storage account and doesn’t provide latest and greatest storage capabilities, which is certainly available with new kind of storage. It also doesn’t provide access tier (Hot and Cold).

General purpose v2: This is a newer version of general purpose v1 storage and provide all the features, which are part of v1 storage. It also provides all the latest features available for blob, files, queues and tables with better performance and pricing. It also supports the access tiering (Hot and Cold) for different needs and performance.

You can upgrade your GPv1 account to GPv2 account, using PowerShell and Azure CLI.

Blob: A blob storage account is mainly to store unstructured data as blob (objects). It also provides access tier (hot and cold) to support different needs and performance. It only supports block blobs and append blobs. It provides only standard performance tier.

Access tiers: Access tiers are supported by General purpose V2 storage account and blob storage account to serve different needs.

  • A Hot access tier indicates that the objects in the storage account will be more frequently accessed. This allows you to store data at a lower access cost. Premium storage always falls under this access tier.
  • A Cool access tier indicates that the objects in the storage account will be less frequently accessed. This allows you to store data at a lower data storage cost.
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#Azure : Map your traditional datacenter compute with cloud VMs

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Cloud has completely changed the IT architecture landscape. Since early days of IT till last decade, Architecture was an abstraction that used to play a key role at the time of transformation or new development. Once Architecture developed, it used to continue for many years with very minimal changes. Since cloud came in its inception, architecture has become a key in day to day work life of an IT professional because of its agility. If not daily then most probably weekly, you can observe some changes in the public cloud world and that needs to be taken care seriously.

In this post, I’ll try to simplify the cloud architecture for compute and will compare with traditional compute architecture. Apart from the simplification, I’ll provide you a logical design thinking approach that will make your life easy no matter what role you are playing in IT.

Let start from traditional datacenter.

If you are an experience IT professional, you must have seen or heard about these names at least once in your career.

Traditional type of Servers: Tower, Rack, and Blade servers.

A true traditional server that comes with multiple configuration options such as dual-processor or quad-processor etc.

New type of platforms: Converged and Hyper-Converged.

These new platforms are basically rack based servers that provide inbuilt advanced storage and networking capabilities by leveraging software defined data center technologies.

Virtualization: In last one decade, every organization has leveraged capabilities of virtualization that enable compute to run multiple virtual machines so that you can fully utilize your high-end servers and save cost in multiple aspects.

Now, let me explain complete compute story in public cloud such as Microsoft Azure.

When you look at compute available through cloud, you can easily determine that it is same kind of virtual machines, which we used to have in our virtualized environment. But in the cloud, the only difference is that you don’t worry about the underlying hypervisor and hardware that is being used behind the scene to provide you virtual machines.

In traditional datacenter, we use multiple racks to install different types of hardware and each rack connects with different power supply units through PDUs and these power supply units connect with main power supply unit. In many scenarios each rack deploys top-of-the-rack switches to provide network connectivity to the devices installed in the rack and in some cases one or two of the racks in the same row deploy these TOR switches. To overcome the challenge of entire datacenter failure, we use multiple datacenters in the form of high-availability and site-resiliency. When an administrator performs any maintenance activity in the traditional datacenter, he/she makes sure that the quorum is maintained while performing maintenance activity to avoid any kind of unexpected failures.

In cloud, H/W level high-availability is being provided by fault domain (unexpected) and maintenance level availability is being provided by update domain, and both features fit under one umbrella that i.e. known as availability sets. To provide high availability, Microsoft Azure uses multiple datacenters (at least two-three) in each region, and to support site resiliency Azure provides multiple region options in same geography or across multiple geographies.

I hope, now you will be able to sketch a clear picture in your mind about traditional datacenter vs cloud.

Now, let me help you with the logical design thinking approach. When you think to deploy a VM or set of VMs, follow the following steps in sequential order.

  1. Think about application and its big picture, keep end-users in your mind and their respective locations.
  2. Select the best suitable cloud region.
  3. Consider different tiering of solution.
  4. Consider security, high availability, site resiliency and load balancing requirements.
  5. Illustrate your network requirements.
  6. Illustrate your storage requirements.
  7. Illustrate your compute requirements.

Once documented all the above, create design diagram and find the approach to deploy your solution. For more details specific to Microsoft Azure compute, read the following blogpost.

#Azure : Virtual Machines

#Azure : Virtual Machine Configuration

#Azure : Virtual Machines High Availability

#Azure : Step-by-step Availability Sets

#Azure : Virtual Machines Scale Sets

#Azure : Large Virtual Machines Scale Sets

#Azure : Large Virtual Machines Scale Sets

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In general, virtual machines scale sets provide auto scalability based on the need. With the normal scale sets, you can have a deployment of 0-100 VMs. But if you have requirements to deploy large scale set of more than 100 VMs then you can opt for large virtual machine scale sets. The basic difference between two is placement group. Placement group in virtual machine scale set is nothing but kind of availability set that maintains its own fault and update domains. This placement groups in virtual machine scale sets have been defined by a parameter “singlePlacementGroup” that has two values either “true” or “false”, if this value is set to “true” then scale set will have a single placement group and the number of virtual machine can be between 0-100, and if the value of “singlePlacementGroup” parameter has been set to “false” then scale set will have multiple placement groups and the number of virtual machine can be between 0-1000.

There is one most important consideration for large VM scale sets i.e. storage. If you choose to go with large VM scale sets then you use managed disks and don’t define your own storage accounts. In VM scale sets, if you don’t go with managed disk then you require multiple storage account i.e. 1 for every 20 VMs but in case of large scale sets you leverage managed disks that simplifies your overhead of managing multiple storage accounts.

Let see how to do it.

Login to the Azure portal and search for “scale” in the azure market place and select the “Virtual machine scale set”.

In the Virtual machine scale set panel, select “Create” to create a new Virtual machine scale set.

In the “create virtual machine scale set” fill the basics information.

Virtual machine scale set name = Enter the scale set name for your virtual machine scale set deployment.

Operating system disk image = Select the operating disk image from drop-down.

Subscription = select your subscription.

Resource group = Create a new resource group or select the existing one.

Location = Select the Azure region from drop-down.

User name = Enter the username that will be used for virtual machines.

Password = Enter the password for the user name.

Confirm password = Re-enter the password to confirm.

Scroll down and fill the required details under “Instances and Load Balancer”.

Instance count = Enter to VMs count between 0 – 100. If you enter any number more than 100 and up to 1000, all the configuration settings will be disable except instance size. As explained above, large-scale sets with more than 100 VMs use managed disk by default and deployment of these large-scale sets take place across multiple placement groups.

Instance size = Select the VM size based on your requirement.

Enable scaling beyond 100 instances = By default “No”, if you select “Yes” then rest of the settings will be disabled as described under instance count. Select “Yes” for large Virtual Machines Scale Sets.

Autoscale = By default disabled but if you enable this feature then you need to define the conditions for the auto scaling.

If Autoscale enabled, fill the required details.

Autoscale

Minimum number of VMs = Enter the minimum number of VMs that required in this scale set.

Maximum number of VMs = Enter the maximum number of VMs that required in this scale set.

Scale out

CPU threshold (%) = Enter the cpu threshold after that VM will be added.

Number of VMs to increase by = Enter the number of VMs that will added when your running VMs reach defined cpu threshold.

Scale in

CPU threshold (%) = Enter the cpu threshold after that VM will be removed.

Number of VMs to decrease by = Enter the number of VMs that will removed when your running VMs reach defined cpu threshold.

Once filled all the details, click on create to start the deployment process.

Apart from these configuration settings, you need to consider following while planning for large VM scale sets.

Limit of 1000 VMs only applicable if you use Azure Marketplace images otherwise you can scale up to 300 VMs if you use your own customize image.

When designing network for large VM scale sets using a single subnet, make sure that your subnet has enough IP addresses for all the VMs. As a best practice, reserve 20% more ip addresses than what you need to support large scale sets.

Azure Load Balancer Standard SKU work with large scale sets because of multiple placement group while scale sets with 100 VMs can leverage basic Load Balancer.

Layer 7 load balancers and application gateways don’t need any specific configuration for large scale sets.

Make sure you are defining fault domain for the VMs that should not be in same fault domain, by default VMs will be speeded across fault and update domain in a specific placement group but that doesn’t mean that two VMs (for ex: these two VMs are required all the times) will not be deployed on same hardware. Use Azure resource explorer and go to the instance view of scale set and verify the fault domain and placement group Ids for the specific VMs.

Make sure you have enough vCPU quota to support large number of VMs in a large VM scale set, otherwise request to increase your vCPU quota.

You can convert your Virtual Machine Scale Set from a single placement group (1-100 VMs) to multiple placement group (1-1000 VMs) using Azure Resource Explorer but not vice-versa. You may not get the option to upgrade to large VM scale sets if you are using old version of the Microsoft.Compute API.

#Azure : Virtual Machines Scale Sets

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Microsoft Azure virtual machines scale sets are a next step in high availability and scalability of virtual machines. Virtual machine high availability can be achieved by availability sets in Microsoft Azure. Microsoft Azure virtual machines scale sets are a group of an identical compute resources deployed in multiple availability sets. It is a true scalable model of auto-scaling that can target large-scale services with big compute, large data and containerized workloads. As these virtual machine scale sets leverage multiple availability sets in the background, therefore scale operations are tacitly balanced across fault and update domains. These scale sets use five fault domains and five update domains in each availability set. Each virtual machine scale sets can host 0-1000 VMs based on platform images, and 0-300 VMs based on custom images.

To define autoscale configuration for consistent application performance, many permutation and combination can be used. Very common rules are compute, memory, and disk I/O utilization. Apart from these common rule of performance metrics, auto scaling of VMs can also depend on application response, or a fixed scheduled.

Note: Virtual Machines scale sets can also be deployed with availability zones.

Now, let me explain you how does this auto scaling works behind the scene. When a new VM added to the scale set, a VM instance Id will be provided to each VM that is unique within a scaleset. When you add or remove a virtual machine from the scale set, the existing Id doesn’t go anywhere. For Example: In a virtual machine scale set you have 10 VMs, if your 2 VMs removed from the scale set based on the configuration and need, and then after some time 5 VMs are added based on the load then new VMs will have Instance id 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 in an incremented manner and these VMs will be balanced across fault and update domains to maintain maximum availability.

Let see how to do it.

Login to the Azure portal and search for “scale” in the azure market place and select the “Virtual machine scale set”.

In the Virtual machine scale set panel, select “Create” to create a new Virtual machine scale set.

In the “create virtual machine scale set” fill the basics information.

Virtual machine scale set name = Enter the scale set name for your virtual machine scale set deployment.

Operating system disk image = Select the operating disk image from drop-down.

Subscription = select your subscription.

Resource group = Create a new resource group or select the existing one.

Location = Select the Azure region from drop-down.

User name = Enter the username that will be used for virtual machines.

Password = Enter the password for the user name.

Confirm password = Re-enter the password to confirm.

Scroll down and fill the required details under “Instances and Load Balancer”.

Instance count = Enter to VMs count between 0 – 100. If you enter any number more than 100 and up to 1000, all the configuration settings will be disabled except instance size. As large-scale sets with more than 100 VMs use managed disk by default and deployment of these large-scale sets take place across multiple placement groups.

Instance size = Select the VM size based on your requirement.

Enable scaling beyond 100 instances = By default “No”, if you select “Yes” then rest of the settings will be disabled as described under instance count.

Use managed disks = By default “Yes”.

Public IP address name = Define name of the public IP address that will be used for load balancer, which will be placed in front of the scale set.

Public IP allocation method = By default dynamic but Static can be selected.

Domain name label = Domain name label for the load balancer in front of the scale set.

Autoscale = By default disabled but if you enable this feature then you need to define the conditions for the auto scaling.

If Autoscale enabled, fill the required details.

Autoscale

Minimum number of VMs = Enter the minimum number of VMs that required in this scale set.

Maximum number of VMs = Enter the maximum number of VMs that required in this scale set.

Scale out

CPU threshold (%) = Enter the cpu threshold after that VM will be added.

Number of VMs to increase by = Enter the number of VMs that will added when your running VMs reach defined cpu threshold.

Scale in

CPU threshold (%) = Enter the cpu threshold after that VM will be removed.

Number of VMs to decrease by = Enter the number of VMs that will removed when your running VMs reach defined cpu threshold.

Once filled all the details, click on create to start the deployment process.

As you observed that in the entire process, virtual network and storage account was not asked anywhere because virtual machine scale sets take care of it behind the scene based on the configuration. Therefore, you don’t have to really worry about it.

#Azure : Step-by-step Availability Sets

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In my previous post, I had explained about the high availability configuration for Azure virtual machines, Availability Sets, Fault domains and Update domains. In this blogpost, I’ll cover step-by-step configuration using Azure Portal. Availability Set configuration can be done in two ways, either by creating and configuring it in early stage based on your application architecture or set it up while creating a first VM for each tier and add rest of the same tier VMs to the respective availability set.

I am going to explain, how to create and configure availability set in advance.

Login to the Azure Portal and select “+ Create a resource”.

In the Azure Market Place, search for Availability Set.

From the search results, select “Availability Set”.

In the Availability Set panel, select create.

In the create availability set panel, define the parameters.

Name: Enter the name of the availability set.

Subscription: Select the subscription.

Resource group: Either create a new one or select an existing one based on your requirement.

Location: Select the location.

Fault domains: Select the number of fault domains, by default it is two but for specific Azure regions you can select up to three fault domains.

Update domains: Select the number of update domains, by default it is five but you go up to 20 update domains in each availability sets.

Use managed disks: Select Yes (by default) if you would like to use managed disk for all the VMs that will be create in this availability set otherwise “No”.

Once, you have filled all the details based on your requirement then select “create” to start the deployment of availability sets.

Wait for few seconds, your availability set will be created. Now, you can go head and create your VMs using this availability set.

While creating a virtual machine you get both the options, either select the existing availability set or create a new one.

If you select the “+ Create new” then again you have to fill the same details as filled earlier then select “OK”.

Once you created an availability set, you will not able to modify it and the same concept applies to VM as well. If you have created a VM as part of the availability set then you can’t come out or change the availability set until you delete and recreate it.

#Azure : Virtual Machines High Availability

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High availability is crucial for any production environment either it is in on-premises datacenter or in cloud. If you will go in detail of high availability, you will observer that HA can be achieved in the following levels from compute perspective:

Hardware level

Hypervisor/VM level

Operating System level

 

In this blogpost, I’ll cover high availability options available in MS Azure. First, make it clear that OS level HA has no difference between on-premises or in cloud. Now, let me provide the overview of H/W, and Hypervisor/VM level HA in on-premises datacenter or private cloud.

Hardware level HA: Dual or Quad processor, dual power supply, multi memory channel, multiple network slots, and multiple PCI card slots etc.

Hypervisor/VM level: All type 1 hypervisors provide high-availability configuration options like operating systems. Once, you configure HA for the hypervisor the VM can be created on top of that and hypervisor HA configuration maintains the availability for guest VMs if any host goes down.

Apart from the H/W and hypervisor level, all the datacenter components can be configured in high available mode such as multiple racks and power supply units etc. but when it comes to public cloud you can’t define the above configurations by your-self. However, cloud service provider does all these configurations for you in advance and to simply the things for you it just provides an availability feature.

Microsoft Azure provides “Availability Set” to provide high-availability at the VM level. This availability set feature takes care of both planned and unplanned failures. To define these planned and unplanned failures, availability set allows you to configure update domain and fault domains.

In simple words, availability set is a logical grouping of two or more virtual machines. When you setup the availability set keep the following principles in your mind:

Setup an availability set for one type of VMs. For example, in 3 tier application architecture create different availability sets for each tier.

For high availability of VMS, create multiple VMs in an availability set.

Attach load balancer with availability sets. It helps you to divide the load among the VMs.

Now, let me explain you update domain and fault domain.

Update domain: An update domain allows VMs to maintain availability during planned maintenance. Each update domain contains set of virtual machines and associated physical hardware that can be updated and rebooted at the same time. It allows Azure to perform incremental or rolling upgrades across a deployment. Once, you create an availability set then you can observe that there are five update domains by default set but you can configure up to twenty update domains.

Fault domain: A fault domain allows VMs to maintain availability during unplanned hardware failures, network outages, power failures and software updates. Fault domain describes the datacenter level components such as network switches and power supply serving a single rack can become a single point of failure for one rack or multiple racks. To avoid these circumstance, VMs in an availability set can have at least two fault domains. Many Azure region only supports two fault domains while other Azure regions can have maximum three fault domains.

If you would like to setup an availability set, follow the step by step availability sets blogpost.

#Azure : Virtual Machine Configuration

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When you have decided to use Azure IaaS virtual machines based on your requirements, you need to look at the configuration. Resource group is required to create any resource in Microsoft Azure. Let see the configuration of virtual machine.

Login to the Microsoft Azure Portal and select “+ create a resource”. Select compute and then select OS that needs to be deployed as part of the VM. In my case, I am deploying “Windows Server 2016 Datacenter”.

In the first step, define settings as required.

Name = Name of the virtual machine, same name will be applied as a host name.

VM disk type = Either HDD or SSD

User name = Default administrator name

Password = Password for the administrative user name

Confirm password = Confirm password for the administrative user name

Subscription = Select subscription from where the VM cost will be deducted

Resource group = Either “Create new” or “Use existing”

Location = Select the location of your Azure Region

Windows license = Select “Yes” if you have windows license otherwise “No”

Finally select “OK”

In the second step, select the VM size based on your requirement. You can short the VM size by selecting disk type, vCPUs and Memory.

In the third step, configure optional features.

High Availability = If you are deploying multiple VMs in the HA mode, create an “Availability set” and define fault & update domain as needed.

Storage = If you would like to use disk managed by Microsoft, select “Yes” in “Use managed disks” option. Otherwise select “No”, if you select “No” then you need to define a storage account.

Network = Select virtual network for the VM. If you don’t have any then a new will be created for you by default but still you can define your virtual network and use the same.

Subnet = select subnet, an ip to the VM will be assigned from this subnet

Public IP address = Use public ip address, if you want to access this VM directly through the internet. Otherwise you can select “None” here.

Network security group = Use network security group, if you would like to access or deny network traffic on the VM level.

Extensions = If you need to use any extensions as part of the VM deployment then add extensions such as PowerShell DSC, Custom Script Extension etc.

Auto-shutdown = Either “On” or “Off” and define the time and time zone based on your needs.

Notification before shutdown = Either “On” or “Off”

Monitoring = Either “Enabled” or “Disabled” for boot and guest OS diagnostics. If you enable the diagnostics then you need to use a storage account. This diagnostics user account either you can create or use the existing one.

Backup = Either “Enabled” or “Disabled”. If you enable backup option then you need to define “Recovery Services vault”, Resource group (for recovery service vault) and backup policy.

Once done select OK.

In the fourth step, review all the configuration and select “Create” to start the deployment process.

Wait for couple of minutes, your VM will be available for use. If you would like to reuse the VM configuration as-is or would like to reuse the VM configuration with customization then “Download template and parameters” for future deployments.

#Azure : Virtual Machines

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Virtual machines look simple in the public cloud space but when do you look at it from the datacenter perspective, you feel the heat. VM is not only a set of resources or a platform with operating system to run your application, runtime or database. It is a baseline that defines the purpose of its existence itself based on the resources used in it. VM configuration is vendor agnostic and totally depends on how do you design it with certain set of components such as processor, memory, storage and networking. Apart from these basic components, there are some specific set of design considerations such as high availability that needs to be taken into the account while planning for any infrastructure based solution. In public cloud, the VM configuration can be determined by VMs size and VMs family type.

Let me take you through the VM design considerations applicable to public cloud. However, these best practices can also be leveraged in private cloud or virtualization stack in the on-premises datacenter.

Storage: How much, where, and in what configuration.

Disk: Sizing, persistence and caching.

Compute: Capacity required.

Availability: Uptime requirements, geo-distribution, service level agreements, and accessibility.

Cost: Azure services, such as storage and compute.

Here is the list of VM sizes and respective description:

Type Sizes Description
General purpose B, Dsv3, Dv3, DSv2, Dv2, DS, D, Av2, A0-7 Balanced CPU-to-memory ratio. Ideal for testing and development, small to medium databases, and low to medium traffic web servers.
Compute optimized Fsv2, Fs, F High CPU-to-memory ratio. Good for medium traffic web servers, network appliances, batch processes, and application servers.
Memory optimized Esv3, Ev3, M, GS, G, DSv2, DS, Dv2, D High memory-to-CPU ratio. Great for relational database servers, medium to large caches, and in-memory analytics.
Storage optimized Ls High disk throughput and IO. Ideal for Big Data, SQL, and NoSQL databases.
GPU NV, NC, NCv2, NCv3, ND Specialized virtual machines targeted for heavy graphic rendering and video editing, as well as model training and inferencing (ND) with deep learning. Available with single or multiple GPUs.
High performance compute H, A8-11 Our fastest and most powerful CPU virtual machines with optional high-throughput network interfaces (RDMA).

Courtesy: Microsoft

While best practices and VMs size should be considered effectively, at the same time you need to find suitable and not suitable workloads for Microsoft Azure VMs.

Suitable workloads:

There are certain types of workloads that are a better fit for hosting in an Azure IaaS environment than others. Here are some examples:

  • Highly available service workloads such as commercial online stores.
  • Unpredictable growth workloads like those experienced by small, but rapidly expanding organizations, or short-term increased sales of fad items.
  • Spiking workloads, such as those experienced by sites providing news services.
  • Steady workload scenarios where organizations simply want to offload their infrastructure to the cloud.
  • Periodic workloads such as retail sales spurts during holidays.

Not Suitable workloads

When planning virtual machine workloads for Azure IaaS, it is also important to remember that not every application or service is a suitable fit for the cloud. Here are some examples.

  • Low volume or limited growth workloads where the organization might be able to run the service or application on commodity hardware on-premise less expensively than in the cloud.
  • Regulated environment workloads where an organization, or even the local government, may regulate the type of data that can be hosted in the cloud. However, these cases might be suitable candidates for a hybrid solution where only some highly available data is hosted in Azure and the more sensitive, regulated data is kept on-premises.

Notice that although Azure virtual machines are based on Windows Server Hyper-V not all Hyper-V features are supported. For example, Multipath I/O and Network Load Balancing are not currently supported. Also, certain Azure virtual machine offerings may include additional Microsoft software on a per-hour or evaluation basis. Licenses for other software must be obtained separately.

#Azure AD : All about Azure Active Directory

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IT has moved from Datacenter Era to the Cloud Era. Focus of the organizations have been changed from one specific set of vendors to the open world of technology. Since Datacenter came in inception, Identity has played a vital role and always been used to treat as a backbone of IT. Now in the new era of multi-cloud environment, Identity is playing a centric role that itself is a new beginning of Identity that has been extended from IT backbone to user-experience oriented.

Microsoft had played a key role in datacenter era by Windows Server Active Directory and now again playing a crucial role in multi-cloud environment by offering Azure Active Directory. Microsoft Azure Active Directory in not only a directory service but it is a complete cloud service that can fulfill all your identity and authorization needs. However, you may find there are couple of things related to identity that can’t be fulfilled by native AAD features but it is continuously evolving.

In this era, organizations don’t need SME for everything but they need design SME who has board understanding of complete end-to end solution stack starting from infrastructure technologies to application technologies.

I have written a series of blog posts on Microsoft Azure AD and these posts mainly focus on how to do it or you can say step-by-step guides backed by real-time scenarios.

Microsoft Azure Active Directory

Azure AD Connect

SSO to SaaS

Application Proxy

Multi-factor Authentication

Self-service Password Management

Self-service group management

Access Panel/My Apps

Dynamic groups membership

Pricing, Licensing and Support

Conditional Access

Custom domain names

Company branding

Cloud App Discovery

Group-based licensing

Identity Protection Part I

Identity Protection Part II

Identity Protection Part III

Privileged Identity Management Part I

Privileged Identity Management Part II

Privileged Identity Management Part III

Azure Active Directory Domain Services Part I

Azure Active Directory Domain Services Part II

Azure Active Directory Domain Services Part III

Azure Active Directory Domain Services Part IV

Device Management – Azure AD Registering

Device Management – Azure AD Join

B2B Collaboration

B2B Licensing

B2C

Error – SSPR_0029: We are unable to reset your password due to an error in your on-premises configuration.

Above series of blog posts have covered most of the areas of Azure Active Directory. You can bookmark this blog post for any Azure AD need, I’ll try my level best to add new Azure AD related posts in this series.

#AzureAD : B2C

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Azure Active Directory B2C is a new way of providing access to the business applications using web & Mobile apps to your business consumers. It provides flexibility to the business to have all types of consumers. Users to the business applications can be divide in three types.

  • Local Accounts (username & password, email account & password)
  • Enterprise Accounts (leverage enterprise accounts by using open standard protocols such as Open ID or SAML)
  • Social Accounts (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google etc.)

Let’s see how to create a B2C tenant and link this tenant with your Azure subscription.

Login to the Azure Portal (https://portal.azure.com) and search for “Azure Active Directory B2C”

Click on “Create”.

Select “Create a new Azure AD B2C Tenant”.

Fill the required details such as organization name, Initial domain name and select the country or region.

Once created, click on “here” to manage the new B2C directory.

You can see the notification to link your B2C tenant with Azure subscription.

To link B2C tenant with your Azure subscription. Select Azure subscription directory from the top right panel.

Now, again search for “Azure Active Directory B2C”.

Click on “Create”.

This time select “Link an existing Azure AD B2C Tenant to my Azure subscription”.

Select the existing Azure AD B2C tenant, select the Azure subscription and finally select the resource group, and then click on create.

Once done, you can open the Azure AD B2C settings.

Now, you can observe that hidden option have ben enabled.

If you would like to add social accounts, go to the “Identity providers” and click on “+ Add”.

Now, give the name of your choice and select the identity provider.

In the next step, you have to provide “Client Id” and “Client Secret”. For example, if you want to add Facebook then first Add the new App. For more information click here.