Top 10 Popular Microsoft Azure Development Tools

Cloud computing has become the need of the hour for every business. So it has become common for every business to search for useful and suitable Azure Development tools and other cloud computing resources. They have to carry out this research to design, develop and deploy apps for the cloud. The foremost determinants of cloud computing service are simplicity and cost reduction. 

The following discussion in this blog will give you a clear idea and insights about Microsoft Azure Development Tools and how it eases the task of developers.

What is Microsoft Azure?

To define, Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform, which has everything a business requires to operate all or part of its computing operations on a virtual basis including database, network, analytics, servers, storage, and a lot more. This useful platform possesses great potential and offers immense value for your invested money.

It offers a wide range of software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) and required infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solutions to deploy services and applications on Microsoft-managed data center infrastructure. The agility and built-in development operations (DevOps) lets you iterate quickly and deliver code with the use of an end-to-end cloud development platform. 

Microsoft Azure Services: (Featured most used products)

The set of featured services offered by Microsoft Azure are affordably priced. You just have to pay only for the services used by you. 

It offers the following set of featured services:

1. Development tools
2. Networking
3. Storage
4. Analytics
5. Virtual computing
6. Azure Functions

Why Azure?

Among other options offered for organizations in terms of cloud computing platforms, economy and simplicity are the two main features considered by any organization while making a choice. The main reason why you should consider Microsoft Azure is that it is reliable, flexible, scalable, and possesses great compatibility with different frameworks and operating systems. 

Following are some reasons which explain why Microsoft Azure is mainly preferred among other cloud computing platforms:

• Flexible: With Azure, you can introduce new services and can also scale your data storage capabilities. When compared this thing to a data center, then it would require altogether a new hardware, purchasing of OS, provisioning, and deployment before additional power can be introduced to stand against your varied IT challenges. The modern flexibility of Microsoft Azure makes it the most suitable solution for all sized organizations.
• Cost: Besides, make it easy and fast to add and scale infrastructure, it is affordable too in terms of cost. With the use of massive infrastructure and expertise of Microsoft Azure, you can reduce your annual IT budget by surprising percentages.
• Apps: With Azure, you can ease the whole task of developing and testing mission-critical applications, a breeze. Not only this, but you can also easily move an application from testing to production mode across a globally distributed network. To add to it, it offers substantial licensing discounts to migrate their existing applications to Azure, which gives way to a substantial amount of savings.
• Disaster recovery: It comes as a huge relief in disaster recovery. The good thing about this platform is its high-speed and geographically decentralized infrastructure which offers boundless options for disaster recovery plans. Your critical data and application can easily run from redundant websites during the recovery period which lasts only minutes or max hours. With this platform, you get the guarantee of continuous service delivery even when any type of disaster strikes.

Top Tools for Azure Developers

An important aspect of Microsoft Azure Development lies in its effectiveness as it is integrated with Visual Studio. This leads to continuous development flow from the setup of a project till its deployment. It also provides better opportunities for managing resources.

Let us have a brief discussion regarding some of the popular tools for Microsoft Azure development that can be used for coding apps and run them quickly:

1. AzurePing
2. Cloud Combine
3. Cloud Explorer for Visual Studio
4. SQL Database Migration Wizard
5. Azure Blob Studio
6. Docker
7. Azure Grid
8. Azure Developer Portal
9. Graph Engine VSExtension
10. Microsoft Azure Storage Connected Service

AzurePing

It is a free monitoring utility extension that proves helpful in maintaining tabs for Azure Storage resources or Azure-hosted databases. It is an effective productivity tool and has in-built loggings and makes use of Apache log4net extensions to add notifications or loggings.

Cloud Combine

It is mainly mentioned among other Azure development tools owing to its multiple functionalities. This tool helps in browsing, downloading, upload and transfer of files between cloud storage services. Also, its cross-platform compatibility feature with different types of cloud storage services like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud is one of the striking highlights of this service. To add to it, this tool helps to easily log in to all the cloud services and storage management resources.

Cloud Explorer for Visual Studio

This is one of the prominent tools among other tools for azure development which helps in the identification of Azure resources as per the name, resource groups, type, and all this simply from Visual Studio IDE. Further, it helps in finding out resource properties along with available developers, diagnostic processes, and activities. Another useful feature of this tool is it integrates effectively with the Azure Preview Portal meant for managing groups and resources. 

SQL Database Migration Wizard

This prominent tool by Microsoft Azure assists in the migration of SQL Server 2002, 2008, 2012 & 2014 databases to the SQL database. It offers useful features namely upgradation and migration analyzers to identify and troubleshoot different possible issues before you decide on migration. It is inclusive of a graphical Wizard interface and has command-line tools for the purpose to suit different preferences and also possesses the ability to script migrations.

Azure Blob Studio

This useful tool lets you easily manage Azure blog storage and helps in creation and removal of containers, retrieving URLs, metadata for blobs, managing blobs, and a lot more. It can be considered as a standalone utility of this tool and proves as a helpful aspect for developers.

Docker

It is currently the most important and recommended tool used to create, manage, and deploying application containers. This fully supported deployment tool is completely backed by Azure and the new Visual Studio 2015 tool for docker proves useful in establishing locally hosted Docker containers for development and debugging along with complete integration with Visual Studio IDE. This integration proves effective in smoothly delivering related tasks. In the case of deploying a container, VSTD offers a simple configuration for handling the complete task by making use of the PowerShell one-liner.

Azure Grid

This prominent azure development tool leverages the Grid Computing framework which offers considerable functionalities for simplifying the complicated work of Azure developers. Further, the framework helps in the easy establishment of a grid, code definition, and data allocation for each node. Also, it offers better control over all these mentioned activities with an effective WPF client application. Further, the client app proves useful in monitoring the whole development procedure. Additionally, the user-friendly interface comes equipped with the required tools for visualization and helps in better observation of the progress or development of a project.

Azure Developer Portal

It is a vital Azure developer tool. Besides, it is an open-source portal for developers as it has styling, authoring, and customization feature carried out through a built-in visual editor. The advanced developer portal in Azure API development comes with an extension of existing functionalities. 

Graph Engine VSExtension

It is SDK by Microsoft Research and provides development functionalities with the use of distributed, in-memory graph processing engine called Trinity. This tool provides full support indirect deployment to Azure from Visual Studio 2012, 2013, and 2015.

Microsoft Azure Storage Connected Service

It is another new tool by Microsoft that offers design-time tools to configure Azure storage services, generate code to consume services, creating, managing or consuming containers, entities, blobs, and a lot more with Visual Studio 2015. It can be considered as an ideal application development tool by Microsoft, owing to its functionality in the consumption of blobs, containers, and entities. 

Wrapping Up

Microsoft Azure is a popular choice by developers when it comes to cloud computing platforms as it comprises a great community of tools.

Different useful tools are available to work with Azure for developers, which makes their task much easy when utilizing it as a platform. Thus, gain in-depth knowledge and hands-on experience, and exposure to Azure development tools to benefit from its diverse range of tools.

You can also consider Azure Consulting Services to get proper guidance and consultation regarding the use of the above-mentioned development tools for your project.