Introduction to Microsoft Azure
Introduction
Windows Azure is a cloud Computing based platform for building scalable applications .So before going deep into azure let us understand what does cloud computing means?
According to Wikipedia, Cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) which are available in a remote location and accessible over a network (typically the Internet).
Problem solved By Cloud
Imagine a scenario in a company for hosting your application you have to buy Hardware like servers, routers etc and software license like OS license, SQL, Sharepoint etc and hosting bandwidth from datacenter and moreover the company need to hire IT Professionals for managing these Infrastructure. If your application succeed and your app have got more load then estimated so you need to scale your application and to do that you need to spend again a lot on hardware ,software and skilled IT Professional to do that. But With Cloud Computing the company can scale the application with just few clicks and its work on PAY PER USE model which means that you don’t have to pay for the infrastructure instead you just have to pay according to the consumption.
It means that paying only what you use and when you use it. Its Like traveling in a public bus and paying only your seats rather than renting the whole bus.
So cloud does the following things:
- Reduce capital and operational costs
- Simplify application deployment and management
- Cost effectively handles peak load
- Simplify scaling to internet scale
- Focus on new functionality and not infrastructure.
Understanding Azure
“Windows Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT Environment ” sourceswindowsazure.com
It is designed for true internet scale. It supports the “Scale Fast Fail Fast” model. which means easy scalability.
It allow developer to apply their existing skills on cloud as it supports many languages like .Net, Ruby, PHP, Java and most importantly its Interoperability with any platform, tools or technology.