Azure Tutorial; Be in cloud

Microsoft in Cloud; Azure

As on today, cloud is what everyone talking about. This is one technology where everyone have a different view. Some say that it is a new technology that will take upon the future and some say that this is nothing new but just the old techniques put in  a different combination and even better some say its better it's just a marketing gimmick. But I would say it's everything and we will find about it more better.

Evolution

Cloud computing is what we see today is nothing but an evolution which started almost 3 decades back. To put a brief description, it's the combination of Autonomic Computing, Grid Computing, Utility Computing, Virtualization and Para virtualization. If your provider is not providing all these facilities as a part of what he calls as cloud, then you are not in cloud. Each and every technology originated at their own time and finally paved the way to evolve as a cloud and that is what we have today.

What Does Cloud Provide

Whenever  a technology or technique gets released and being discussed as a hot topic over market, there will be always a debate on calling it as a boon or curse and sometimes its nothing but a pack of unwanted options for few. But technology has to be always seen as whether it solves one's need or not and that can differ from person to person. So how does cloud help me or what does it have?

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure is considered as a major investment for any corporates or SME. But for smaller corporates and SMEs this can be a nightmare and inefficient machines or support engineers can put their whole business into jeopardy.  Every year there are millions of dollars ruined because of a inefficient / careless or a juvenile network or system support personnel. But to hire the best, you will need another major investment to be put and finally you will end up spending more money for maintaining your infrastructure rather maintaining your business. Any vendor who already run a web hoisting service or data center can upgrade their process to get into this business.

Fortunately you get this as a service in the market with many service providers. Now lets see what will you get as a part of IaaS.

• Hardware and Operating System which are required for you to run your application will be provided by the vendor.
• Hardware, connectivity or failover will be the responsibility of the vendor but they are subjected to differ by vendor and the subscription.
• Software and the application you will need to run will be your (client's) responsibility. Anything which is down / crashed with respect to that will be your responsibility and most of the vendors don’t entertain in helping you on that.

What does Microsoft Provide

Microsoft is yet to get into this business. But we are definitely going to enter with a huge bang and you can expect us very shortly.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Now this is a trickier and the most intuitive technology / service that one have to provide. Here you will get all the infrastructure and the software/ service will not bother you anymore. In most the cases the infrastructure is totally transparent to the client and all he sees is nothing but a url where his application is running.

Below are the features you get as a part of this service.

• Hardware, Operating and all the software that would be as the part of vendor platform will be taken care of himself.
• Client doesn’t have to pay for the license of the Operating system or the platform.
• The only part that the client can control is the app he has built using the vendor's platform.

What Does Microsoft Provide

Microsoft Azure is the brainstorm of this service. Unlike other providers, Azure is integrated with the world's most widely used programming technology (.net). And any .net programmer can take the advantage of the technology to have his application on cloud. We will discuss more on Azure as we walkover.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

This is one most popular service available in the web and there are many vendors and many applications which are taking this approach. Initially when you wanted to have applications, you would require to buy or subscribe and installed over your own machine or network and avail it's usage. Now with this service, your data is taken to the cloud and the vendor will provide the service through the cloud.

Below is what you get with this service.

• Hardware, operating system and platform is totally hidden from the client.
• All the infrastructure and platform licensing and maintaining is taken by the vendor.
• The client will avail the service using subscription and work with the software over web.
• The licensing will be more pronounced as subscription per user or anything else depending on the SLA.

What does Microsoft Provide

Microsoft is already having a huge share on market with this service. Office Live is a free service available to any live id where you can edit or create office applications online. BPOS and Office 365 is another subscribed application on the cloud through which Microsoft takes the whole back office functioning to cloud and the user doesn’t have to worry about the infrastructure or software licensing. Windows Intune will  be the next service (already in beta) to be added soon to cloud.

Advantages

As already discussed, the advantages and disadvantages a technology will make is mostly with respect to the perspective and necessity of the user. However, lets try to find out what are the advantages you will get to enjoy being in cloud.

Please do remember that existing technologies will also have the features which we are going to discuss below but, it's the entire feature set which you get in a single technology is what makes a difference.

Infrastructure Overhead & Cost

As discussed earlier, for any company this would be the worst nightmare of the business. Infrastructure creation and maintenance might sound easy but for any financial officer who runs the business will definitely understand the pain he has to go into in keeping the back office running and up to date. With the infrastructure put into the cloud where you don’t have to worry about keeping it updated and maintaining and data backup, this would definitely help any organization which doesn’t have a full fledged infrastructure or a capable support person or which doesn’t have a budget for huge investment.

Think about forgetting space rent, maintaining / buying servers, electricity, cooling, hiring excelled employees and keeping them up to date. For most companies, this would be a big overhead dropped out.

Agile

Any cloud service provider has to be agile and if not then, you are not in cloud. Sometimes, requirement hits you on the head with no intimation and the only way you can handle is having everything in place. But why would one have to keep everything prepared for the worst time which might or not happen. Keeping the cost in mind most the companies never prepare for it and when it hits, it hits for bad. With cloud you always have the option of changing your requirement on the fly without any affecting delays.

Reliability

Reliability is something what you can take for granted with machines. Imagine your whole data center goes center due to a network outage of a bad virus hit and you have no 911 in place. Depending on the size of your business and the down time your loss will be in millions and even in billions. Most companies have to sign up with different vendors across globe for data backup, mirroring or emergency setup and you can imagine the cost involved in replicating your datacenter. The reliability has to come as a bundled package with cloud service. Azure ensures that your application or service or data is 99.9% up and running.

Remember it is the application which is guaranteed in Azure where as most the competitors provide the guarantee only to the server or the VM alone in Azure.

Scalability

Yet another feature that most the business on the web need as of today. Imagine you are running a NFS streaming site and the races happen only few times in a year and your major business will be on those days and if your bandwidth outs one single day; your loss will be a bigger percentage on annual growth. Say on an ordinary day your site will have a hit of few hundreds and during the days when races are on it will raise millions. Now without cloud you will need maintain the hardware and infrastructure which will happily allow the maximum traffic through out the year which will lie unused for most the year. However, with cloud all you need is to pay as per the usage and with the cloud you will have virtually infinite limit of resources that your application can make use of.

Availability

Since the  cloud vendors have to maintain your resources in a globally available location and with almost no down time, you will be released with the overhead of maintaining your resources available 24/7.