Cloud computing with Windows Azure

[Botan]

The topic of cloud computing, which is the shifting of server services over the Internet to virtual servers in data centers, service providers, is becoming increasingly popular in many companies. The reasons are mainly for cost savings while improving the high availability and performance of the server. In addition, make cloud applications much easier to scale and expand as a separate server. Microsoft offers businesses with Windows Azure, the ability to transfer data to Microsoft data centers and applications to use online that Microsoft and partners to make available. Windows Azure is aimed primarily at software developers and companies around the world want to deploy highly available applications. With this technology, however, all files and databases of a company lie on database servers in data centers by Microsoft or its partners. Communication takes place via the Internet, so that an available and fast Internet connection is necessary for the operation. The base OS is Windows Azure, an operating system based on virtual servers in data centers at Microsoft. On this basis, set additional services, such as SQL Azure, on. Microsoft partners also offer solutions and applications to the Windows Azure platform.

[Wannabe]

The Azure technology from Microsoft currently focuses primarily on SQL Azure, thus providing an online database in Microsoft data centers based on Windows Azure OS. The database is thus based on Windows Azure OS, the cornerstone of this technology, all of which use online services from Azure. Since these data centers worldwide are available, companies have the advantage of all branches of the data in SQL to access Azure, namely performing and at predictable costs. The database is Microsoft to highly available and extremely scalable available. Windows Azure is part of the Microsoft Online Services. In addition to Microsoft Azure is at this point Exchange Online, Office Live Meeting, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online and Office Web applications are available. These services include but are not directly about Windows Azure, but are separate technologies.

[Sharanya]

The Azure technology currently consists of the Windows Azure OS and the SQL database Azure. Other options in this regard, the Windows Azure AppFabric, which allows developers to integrate additional services based on Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Python and other programming languages. Applications can run with other applications and SQL Azure services communicate and exchange data. Basically, applications based on SQL Azure similar to ASP.NET applications and use the same architecture and the programming language C #. There are front ends for the web and back-end roles for the respective services. The central tool for Azure is therefore Visual Studio 2010 . For development, you should download the aforementioned extensions for Visual Studio 2010.

[Muwafaq]

The advantage of Windows Azure compared to traditional server solutions is that companies quickly find space and computing power, even in hardware without the need to invest. In addition, this also the outsourcing of administrative activities is possible, which lowers the cost in case of need also. Microsoft distributes the data across multiple server instances, so Microsoft Azure is also highly available. Since this data in Microsoft's own data centers and operates Windows Azure is also made of Microsoft technologies, hardware and software work perfectly together.

[Umberto-Micro]

The prices are unfortunately still a little opaque, since they also depend on the number of transactions. The advantage is that these prices are valid worldwide and consistently, so find international companies a uniform price basis. Generally, clients must pay the processing power, storage space and data traffic. Here, Microsoft offers the hour-based tariffs, billing is usually done on a monthly basis. The best way to interested companies to submit an offer of a Microsoft partner. Who has booked an MSDN subscription can also use Azure, in the context of a specific quota even free.

[techcello]

Choosing between Windows Azure, and other alternatives such as Amazon / Rackspace is sometimes a difficult choice. Once you have built your multi-tenant application for Windows 2008 / SQL 2008, you can host it in a Data centre or in public cloud platforms such as Amazon and Rackspace.

However the primary reason why some one would prefer to host on Azure is the fact that it claims to take care of auto elasticity. Auto elasticity means the ability of the underlying infrastructure to scale up or scale down depending on the load. While in the case of Amazon or Rackspace you need to use their monitoting services and then spin off additional instances of infrastructure to take care of increase in load, (this has to be done manually by a System Administrator or you have to write scripts that integrate with the Amazon Monitoring services), in the case of Azure, Azure, claims that elasticity is automatically taken care of by it.

So the choice is often based on how big your product is, how many clients and users will be using it, whether there will be huge swings in infrastructure requirements that cannot wait for manual intervention etc.