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The rise in popularity of Cloud computing has seen a move away from traditional servers. In this, leading the pack of this service provider is Microsoft Azure. It offers a host of interrelated Cloud based services, which effectively facilitate this option.
Solutions
With Microsoft Azure solutions, consumers no longer need to build, maintain & deploy their own data centers or on-premise servers. Instead, they can take advantage of services that replace their old monolithic & expensive architecture with lightweight on demand instances, & only pay for what they need or use.
This option allows companies & developers to concentrate on their applications more effectively since their time, finances & efforts are optimized & directed away for unnecessary tasks which would be required to maintain their own in-house structures.
For many organizations & startups, Cloud computing is also a better option than 3rd party hosting, because even if a company hires servers rather than owning them, the cost & headaches involved are reduced by sets of Cloud options, which are consumed & deployed, only as required — rather than paid for in advance on the premise that they might be necessary.
Resources
Microsoft Azure offers a wide variety of Cloud based services, from virtual machines, CDNs(Content Delivery Networks) to data stores, there’s an option for just about any IT requirement you can think of.
Additionally, Microsoft makes selecting & maintaining services easy — it offers a price calculator to estimate current & future costs, as well as an online dashboard to manage services & profile accounts.
Selectively, a curated collection of Microsoft proprietary products as well as other options such as Linux technologies can be leveraged using the Azure Cloud.
Azure supports application development & hosting requirements by providing IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) for hosting & PaaS (Platform as a Service) for development.
The platform facilitates the building of web apps, mobile backends & API apps.
The App Service, offered by Azure, supports common building & deployment tools such as GitHub webhooks, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, TeamCity, & others. As well as offering an easy to use, migration tool so that consumers can move existing apps to the service without too much effort.
In Azure you have the option to deploy either Windows or Linux Virtual Machines. The system offers complete control over configuration, while you’re responsible for installation, maintenance & operating system patches.
Azure allows you to run a variety of workloads, which include database servers, Windows Server Active Directory, & Microsoft SharePoint.
Azure Functions offers a ‘serverless’ protocol, which means that the application runs in response to your code’s triggers.
Therefore, consumers can concentrate on writing code, without the need to worry about the architectural overhead. HTTP requests, webhooks & Cloud service events are the catalysts for code deployment, so your application responds as necessary.
Functions support several development languages, such as C#, F#, Node.js, Python, or PHP.
Offering support for WebAPI with Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN) & ASP.NET Core, Azure Service Fabric makes it easy to develop scalable Microservices. SDKs are available for .Net Core & Java.
Additional Services
The core services are backed up by Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), which offers secure & reliable user authentication as well as several data stores such as Microsoft’s SQL Server, Cosmos DB, Azure Storage & Azure Data Factory.
Additionally, Azure Containers offers support for Docker Images, so that applications can be deployed under the Docker umbrella.
Azure has a multitude of servers around the globe, so many in fact, particularly in 3rd world countries, that it offers broader coverage than either of its competitors, AWS (Amazon Web Services) & Google Cloud Platform.
You need to have a Microsoft Account to get Microsoft Azure solutions or products, but with $200 new client credit or a 30 free trial, as well as several free tier trial services, such as 10 free web apps, there’s very little reason not to give Azure a try, you may find yourself pleasantly hooked.