Things to consider when migrating to Azure part 2

Here some other issues i stumbled upon by selflearning and researching around migrating your current onpremise apps to Azure. As mentioned before, just having things run in the cloud is not that difficult, but having things run in a scalable, well designed, fully using the possibilities in Azure, in a cost efficient way is something different. Here are some other things to consider.

- To be able to meet the SLA's you need to assure that your app runs with a minimum of two instances (rolecount = 2 in your configuration file per deployment of web, worker or VM role)
- To make things easy as possible and make as few changes as possible consider using SQL Azure Migration Wizard to migrate onpremise databases to sql azure databases (http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/)
- Moving your intranet applications to Azure probably requires changes in your authentication code. While intranet apps commonly use AD for authentication, webapps in the cloud still can use your AD information but you need to setup AD federation or use a mechanism like Azure Connect to enable the use of AD in your cloud environment.
- After migrating your SQL Database to the Cloud you need to change your connectionstring but also realize that you need to "connect" to a database and that you cannot use in your code. SQL Azure is about connecting to databases itself. Also realize that it is not possible to use Windows Authentication. Encrypt your web.config or other config files where your connectionstrings reside. It's a good habit to treat your application as "insecure" at all times and use proper Thread Model to put your finger on possible security breaches. This will keep you alert in any design decision you make regarding "security". Look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998283.aspx how you can encrypt your configuration files using RSA.
- Additional security to your SQL Azure assets can be provided by using the firewall which allows you to specificy IP addressess that are allowed to connect to your SQL Azure database.

I'll post more on this blog when i stumble upon more...