An Overview Of Cloud And Azure Cloud

Introduction

In this article, we will explore the pillars of the Microsoft Azure cloud.

I will be adding more articles on the Azure cloud that will help you to move on further.

Scenario

These articles will help you to start the study of the Azure Cloud and go through them one by one. I will help you to go step by step in learning to accomplish this.

Prerequisite

Basic knowledge of software technology.

Background

Why use a cloud platform or cloud computing service?

Ans

Cloud helps us with the following major benefits,

• To rapidly set up your environments – Infrastructure, Software, etc.
• To scale up your applications to meet peak demands
• Increase daily activities & efficiency
• Automated elasticity approach on demand
• Efficient scalability
• High availability
• Suitable pricing models
• Automation, monitoring, deployment
• Reduce cost
• Focus on business functionality
• Access applications from any time, anywhere

List of cloud providers

• AWS (Amazon Web Servers)
• Microsoft Azure cloud
• Google Cloud
• Vmware
• Terremark
• Rackspace
• Digital Ocean
• Joyent
• IBM Cloud

Does the cloud focus on functionality?

• More geographic options - Datacenters
• OS - installation, licensing, updates, patches
• High availability, scalability, load balancing
• Enterprise Integration
• Security
• Network
• Maintenance & Fault tolerance
• Efficient Storage
• Intelligence Analytics
• Serverless Computing
• Language supports (.NET, JAVA, PHP, Python, C, C++, etc.)
• Promotes Agility (continued integrations/deployments)
• Environments (staging, production)
• IoT, Analytics
• Resource management

What is an Azure cloud?

• “Microsoft Azure is a flexible cloud platform/ cloud computing service by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers.”
• Simple words – ‘Cloud Service by Microsoft’
• Microsoft Azure, formerly known as Windows Azure
• Released on February 1, 2010
• Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help your organization meet your business needs and challenges.

Azure cloud data centers

Azure Cloud provides more regional data centers than any other cloud provider (54 geographic regions worldwide, 140 countries as of Oct 2018, and its growing)

Below is a screenshot from Microsoft explaining data center availability,

Pillars of the Azure cloud

It is very important to understand the pillars of the cloud in depth which will help you with design considerations of your application,

1. Compute
2. Storage
3. Networking and Content Delivery
4. Database
5. Analytics and Big Data
6. Intelligence
7. Internet of Things (IoT)
8. Management & Monitoring
9. Mobile Services
10. Security, Identity & Access
11. Developer Tools
12. Enterprise Integrations
13. Hybrid Cloud
14. User-friendliness
15. Data Centers
16. Availability
17. Pricing Options
18. Disaster Recovery

In the next article, I will be describing the individual pillars in detail.