Genomics in the Azure Cloud

Chapter 8. Deployment, Security, Compliance, and Potpourri

While you may be a bioinformatics scientist who really cares only about analyzing your sequence data, there is a lot more that goes on when trying to manage a cloud environment. From security to costs, there are lots of facets to ensuring your cloud is scalable, private, and compliant, and doesn’t break the bank. In this chapter, I’ll be covering some of the ancillary things related to Azure cloud management. Trust me, if you get these things right, your IT team will love you.

Automating the Deployment of Cloud Resources

Throughout this book, we’ve spun up various cloud services such as a storage account, Databricks, and more. While we can continue to manually spin up these services, a key to scalable, enterprise-ready architectures is to have the entire set of resources be fully deployable in an automated way.

This ensures that if something were to get deleted or if we needed to redeploy everything in a different location across the globe, we could do so with ease. In fact, the latter scenario (deploying in another place on the planet) is a requirement that is becoming more common to meet regulatory requirements, especially with sensitive health data. This concept is known as infrastructure as code (IaC), where code dictates what gets deployed rather than relying on a human to remember what/how to deploy critical parts of an architecture.

Dev, Staging, and Prod

In the IT world, it’s common to have separate environments ...