I am working on a backup solution for Azure SQL. There is a manual way to backup the databases, but who wants to be the guy pressing the button every day or worst case scenario every week. At least there is a manual way of performing the backup, though, I do not know if the recommended way does a copy first to ensure database integrity.
To be honest, this is not the first backup solution that I have had to come up with, but is the first one for azure. Azure complicates things. Backing up an on premise solution, or backing up the information on a machine to local storage is a breeze. Being able to check on the status, and knowing system state at all times is not an issue. Move the solution to a remote PaaS based architecture and the simplicity goes away.
Once again, I run into issues of moving from working with Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure. In AWS, the API is well documented and samples abound. Move to Azure, and it is akin to finding a needle in a hay-stack. It is not that the information is not there, it is just that there is not as much of it.
So while I am working on this project, I stumble over issue after issue working with Azure. The storage stuff just seems to trump everything else. Which classes to use, which libraries to import, how to import it into your project. All these are small things that crop up.
I just spent an hour debugging a problem to find out that I did not use Nuget to install the libraries. This is just killing me on some levels. Guess I should do a writeup on how to use Azure with C#, but right now, I have to finish the base work on this app.