Cloud Computing using Microsoft Azure for Dummies

Microsoft Azure is one of the first On-Demand Cloud Services available since several years, along with Amazon.

So what is this Cloud Computing?

“Cloud computing, also known as 'on-demand computing', is a kind of Internet-based computing, where shared resources, data and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand” [Wikipedia]

Since a few years, and especially thanks to the worldwide Globalization, the amount of data exchanged over the Internet has been growing exponentially, bringing into the game some new paradigm such as Big Data, which challenged the existing hardware and infrastructure at every level.

Most public exposed systems and websites had suddenly to deal with a huge amount of traffic, data and requests, from any part of the world, with potential peaks at any given time, 24/7. 

This represented a big challenge for the stability and availability of systems, which for most businesses required an incredible investment in time, money and resources, just to barely cope with it.

Also, because of the unpredictability of the peaks of requests, traditional hardware solutions proved to be ineffective, as more hardware was generally bought in order to scale-up and fulfill the peak load, but once the peak decreased, the hardware were sitting there underused, increasing the TCO and lowering the ROI.

  

Just to give an idea of what the Cloud challenge represents, the following picture of the Microsoft Azure Cloud, and even though it is not necessarily up-to-date, it already shows some figure of what Azure can handle.

Now, try to match those figures with your own hardware infrastructure…

Cloud computing is generally offered as one of the three following services:

  

IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service

Examples such as Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Storage and many more, offer a virtual infrastructure where to create, deploy and manage mainly virtual machines. The main difference between this infrastructure and an On-Premise one is that the physical hardware resides inside some remote data center rather than a local server, but both rely on virtualization of the OS, network, and all infrastructure layers.

PaaS – Platform as a Service

Once a virtual infrastructure is setup, the next step is to provide a virtual platform where to create, deploy and manage custom-made applications. Microsoft Azure, Force.com, Google App Engine are famous examples of such offer. Generally PaaS uses specific ways of packaging applications, so they can be easily deployed and managed within the platform.

SaaS – Software as a Service

GMail, Salesforce.com, Google Apps are all example of SaaS, which by definition is a “software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet” [http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/Software-as-a-Service].

From an Enterprise Architecture perspective, Azure IaaS covers the IT/Technology Domain, while Azure PaaS covers the Information (Data/Application) Domain. Both allow the releasing and managing of custom-made SaaS.

From a Software Development perspective, the Azure PaaS simplifies the deployment and management of custom-made applications, using specific templates such as Cloud Service, Web App, Api App and Mobile App.

So enjoy Cloud Computing in Azure!