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Our Answer: As per the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

Our Answer:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS): Applications delivered to end users running from the provider’s infrastructure. SaaS is used by business users for email, office automation, customer relationship management, business intelligence, enterprise resource planning and other related scenarios.
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS): Used by developers and application providers as a computing platform that typically includes the operating system, programming language execution environment, database and web services.
3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): IaaS is the foundational cloud platform layer. It is used by IT administrators for the provisioning of processing, storage, networks or other fundamental computing resources where users can run arbitrary software.

Our Answer: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) can provide enormous advantages over on-premise infrastructure because of the ability to provision and scale quickly and dynamically. Cloud infrastructure is sold as a variable cost, utility pricing model. You pay only for what you use, while you are using it. The pricing model and the total cost is attractive, but the real value is the agility cloud affords an organization. Simply put, with IaaS you can do stuff quickly that you couldn’t do in your own IT environment. 

Our Answer: Azure is Microsoft’s open and flexible cloud platform for business that allows you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications and services. Azure comes with many associated services, including those for compute, storage, data, networking, and apps. In a slightly simplified view, Azure provides services for applications, data, compute and network.

A more detailed breakdown by “Azure Components” can be found on the Microsoft Azure Documentation webpage, which gives an overview of services by similar function and important sub-services. 

According to the above handy Microsoft’s info-graphic, Azure can help you “quickly build, deploy, and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters”.

You can also build and run applications using any language, tool, or framework within four primary models: 1) Virtual Machines, 2) Cloud Services, 3) Web Sites, and 4) Mobile Services.

Microsoft Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help your organization meet your business challenges. It’s the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive, global network using your favorite tools and frameworks.

Yes, security and privacy are built into the Azure platform. Microsoft is committed to the highest levels of trust, transparency, standards conformance and regulatory compliance with the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings of any cloud service provider.

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Our Answer: Amazon and Google are the only two other companies with cloud solutions and the ability to execute at the same global scale, Microsoft is the only one of the three with similar enterprise infrastructure and expertise at its core.

A huge advantage of Azure is the ability to integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment. You don’t have to choose between one or the other, it allows you to run a hybrid environment.

Azure also allows you take advantage of existing enterprise license agreements you may have if you already have Microsoft technology in your IT infrastructure.

Our Answer: In addition to the technical planning, making the right business case is critical. Consider which scenarios lend themselves the most to getting started with a journey to the cloud. Here are two types of scenarios you could look at first:

Scenarios that are needed but not needed all the time:

If your organization has a seasonal need for high-performance computing or additional virtual machine capacity, think of the possibilities of using Azure to temporarily switch on a massive amount of virtual machines. Why buy the hardware if you can just switch it on for as long as you need it? You only pay for what you use. These types of scenarios are the low-hanging fruit when choosing a workload to move.

Scenarios when new expensive infrastructure is needed:

If your organization is growing or embarking on new long-term, IT-intensive projects, or some of your existing IT infrastructures will be reaching the end of its lifecycle soon, you may be looking at the considerable cost for new hardware in the near future. As outlined in the IaaS cloud vs. on-premise cost comparison in a previous chapter, a move to the cloud may offer a great way of limiting IT spending. That said, the benefits will only materialize with proper planning of all aspects. In addition to using Microsoft’s toolkit, you may want to work with a Microsoft consulting partner for detailed planning. For example, to move from testing cloud solutions to making them run in your production environment, you need to have the tools and systems in place that give you the confidence that IT health and performance are being monitored, issues can be addressed quickly, and costs are closely managed.

Ninety percent of Fortune 500 companies trust their business to run on the Microsoft Cloud and are doing amazing things with it.

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With no upfront cost, you only pay for what you use. Azure provides flexible purchasing and pricing options for all your cloud scenarios, such as the Azure Hybrid Benefit and offers extensive tools to help manage your cloud spend.

Azure is the only consistent hybrid cloud, has more regions than any cloud provider, delivers unparalleled developer productivity and offers more comprehensive compliance coverage—including meeting the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Our Answer: One of the reasons why Microsoft Azure is such a compelling cloud platform is that it easily enables all three options and integrates with your existing on-premise IT infrastructure. The three types of cloud are :

1. Public Cloud: Shared services or resources provided by a third party and available to many participants or tenants.
2. Private Cloud: Cloud computing resources open to just the owner. Can be hosted on-premise or off.
3. Hybrid Cloud: Cloud computing resources spread between your own systems and a third party’s resources.

Our Answer: 

Azure offers many services in its cloud computing platform. These services include the following.

Compute services

Services for hosting and running application workload:

• Azure Virtual Machines—both Linux and Windows
• App Services (Web Apps, Mobile Apps, Logic Apps, API Apps, and Function Apps)
• Azure Batch (for large-scale parallel and batch compute jobs)
• Azure RemoteApp
• Azure Service Fabric
• Azure Container Service

Data services

Services for storing and managing data:

• Azure Storage (comprises the Azure Blob, Queue, Table, and File services)
• Azure SQL Database
• Azure DocumentDB
• Microsoft Azure StorSimple
• Azure Redis Cache

Application services

Services for building and operating applications:

• Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)
• Azure Service Bus for connecting distributed systems
• Azure HDInsight for processing big data
• Azure Scheduler
• Azure Media Services

Network services

Services for networking both within Azure and between Azure and on-premises datacenters:

• Azure Virtual Network
• Azure ExpressRoute
• Azure-provided DNS
• Azure Traffic Manager
• Azure Content Delivery Network

For detailed documentation on each of these services, as well as other Azure services, see Azure service documentation.

Our Answer: Think of “unpredictable bursting”, an unplanned peak in demand or sudden spike that impacts performance. Or consider “on and off workloads” or “predictable bursting”, when you have recurring peaks due to periodic increasing demands. With on-premise equipment, you can’t over-provision for these extreme peaks unless you want to have a massive, complex and expensive IT infrastructure sit idle for long periods of time. For example, if your organization is in need of high-performance computing power once a quarter, it is much easier to turn on several hundred servers temporarily through IaaS. Other scenarios could include transient or short-term environments required for development or testing.

If you are part of an organization with rapid growth, IaaS is especially relevant. Successful services need to grow and scale. If money is no object, you can certainly over-provision by investing in your own hardware at an early stage and overpay until you reach capacity. But if you grow faster than expected, you may still be in a situation where you can’t provision hardware fast enough. With IaaS you can scale your infrastructure on demand in the cloud, and pay more as you use more.

Another relevant cloud scenario example is “tier” upgrades for compute and storage. For a traditional infrastructure organization to increase a server’s processing power or memory requires an expensive upgrade or even a new server. This would usually take days and even weeks to complete. Storage I/O improvement would typically involve a SAN re-configuration or, in some cases, a new SAN. Local storage I/O improvements would require the introduction of additional spindles for a RAID setup, faster disks, or SSDs. All of these scenarios are time-consuming and expensive. With IaaS, these types of upgrades take seconds to minutes to complete with a modest increase in cost. You get tremendous business agility, something that is not possible with traditional on-premise infrastructure.

Even if your IT infrastructure needs are entirely predictable and consistent, IaaS is a good option because of the ongoing reduction in cloud storage and compute costs. The usage of a highly-available, enterprise-grade infrastructure to run virtual machines is very competitive using cloud solutions. And based on predictions by industry observers, the price is only going down.

Our Answer: Microsoft Azure provides a great entry and transition strategy for organizations that want to extend their data center to the cloud, and the momentum for Azure has been steadily building over the past years. 

At the Build 2015 conference, Microsoft provided some numbers around Azure usage:

• More than 90,000 new Azure customer subscriptions per month
• 1.4 million SQL databases in Azure
• More than 50 trillion storage objects in Azure
• 425 million Azure Active Directory users
• 3 million developers registered with Visual Studio Online 
• More than 40% of Azure revenue from start-ups and ISVs
• 19 Azure Compute Regions open

Azure offers solution partners that can help deploy and manage your existing solutions, as well as offer ready-made or custom solutions for you. Plus, you can find an experienced managed service partner such as Burhani or have your existing outsourcing partner become an Azure partner.

Our Answer: Using Azure to integrate Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) into your IT environment is a great way of getting started, and paves the way for Platform as a Service (PaaS) as a logical next step.

However, using Azure to enable IaaS in your organization requires the consideration of many options with many benefits, so it is definitely advisable to include a thorough assessment and capacity planning process.

At the very basic level, you need to inventory your tech infrastructure, and be sure to be able to answer these questions:

• What do I have in my current IT infrastructure?
• Where is it?
• What are my performance metrics?

Microsoft provides resources to help with this process. For example, the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit for Azure “gets your cloud migration planning process going with automated discovery and detailed inventory reporting of web applications, application portfolios, and database readiness for Azure platform”.

It helps you catalog all of the applications in your IT environment, and provides a readiness and capacity assessment.

Azure Readiness Assessment & Capacity Assessment:

• Estimate the needed capacity to run your applications on the Azure Platform
• Evaluate applications based on migration difficulty
• Stack rank applications in terms of migration suitability
• Obtain a TCO-ROI analysis for the application
• Helps you to plan for the migration of on-premises workloads to Azure

Microsoft is putting enormous efforts into building out Azure, its cloud platform for business. Both the amount and the pace of updates to Azure are astonishing. It’s not easy to keep up with all the developments, especially if you are just getting started with Azure. Microsoft provides guidance and information on its cloud platform in a few places online.

Here are just a few of the key ones:

• Azure Service Updates: This page is the home of all service updates to Azure. There are new posting several times each week, and you can also subscribe by RSS feed.
• Cloud Platform Roadmap: The roadmap page provides a snapshot of what Microsoft is working on in the Cloud Platform business. It includes an overview of what’s become available recently, public previews, projects in development, and canceled projects.
• Microsoft Azure Blog: The official blog combines posts from many different members of the Azure team; it’s a good place to start before digging into some of the other resources on TechNet and MSDN
• Azure on Twitter: If you are using Twitter, the Azure account is a great way of following the latest and greatest from the Azure team.
• Azure on Facebook: For those who prefer Facebook, the Azure team posts its updates here too.
• Azure tag on MSDN Blogs: If you are looking at Azure from the dev/test side, there are almost daily posts about Azure here
• TechNet – In the Cloud Blog: Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Enterprise Client & Mobility blogs about Cloud here. While his focus is more on mobility, he does mention Azure frequently
• TechNet – Building Clouds Blog: This TechNet blog focuses on “…building hybrid clouds that can support any device from anywhere”. It features a great overview of topics by track at the top of the blog, which makes it easy to dive into anything from Application Management to Disaster Recovery or VM Migration.
• TechNet – Server & Cloud Blog: This blog aggregates posts from Microsoft’s Server & Cloud Platform team.
• Microsoft Cloud Platform on Facebook: In addition to the Azure page on Facebook, the Server & Cloud Platform team has a presence too.
• TechNet – Azure Forum: There are several Azure topic threads in the TechNet Forums. Just click on the drop-down menu in the left sidebar and select one of the topics.
• Microsoft Azure eBooks: Microsoft offers a number of eBooks about Azure on the Virtual Academy website.

These links are only some of the “official” resources from Microsoft. Of course, there is also a large community of Azure users out there sharing perspectives on Redmond’s cloud platform efforts, including The Azure Group: Infrastructure Focus

No. Azure supports open source technologies, so you can use the tools and technologies you prefer. Run virtually any application using your data source, with your operating system, on your device. With Azure, you have choices.

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