Ever wondered what benefits you would derive if you move to the cloud? or maybe you have not even heard about "the cloud". What's really so special about the cloud? In this article, I would explore what the cloud is, and some of the main benefits of moving your resources to it.
What is the cloud computing?
Cloud computing is a way to rent compute power, storage or any other resources from someone else who has excess of it. It is basically the delivery of computing services over the internet (cloud). These services include storage, database, networking, analytics and Artificial intelligence.
To put this in simple terms, instead of maintaining your CPUs and servers in your own building, you can rent these resources on the cloud for the time you want to use them. The cloud provider takes care of maintaining all this resources. This eliminates all the problems of having these infrastructures on-site thus, enabling you focus on your most important business challenges.
There are various cloud service providers. The main ones are:
Microsoft Azure
Amazon Web services
Google Cloud
Oracle
IBM cloud
This article will be more focused on the benefits of moving and running your resources on Microsoft Azure.
What is Azure?
So, what is Azure? Azure is Microsoft cloud computing platform with an ever-expanding service to help businesses meet their goals. Microsoft has a vast number of well distributed data centres which allows business to locate their apps and data where they are most needed. Thereby improving its performance. Infrastructure management, scalability, availability, and security are managed for you, thus saving you time and money
Benefits of the Cloud
Cost savings
The main benefit of moving to the cloud is the cost savings. You might ask, how is this cheaper than me having these facilities on-site? Well, through the cloud, these computing resources are delivered over the internet by using pay-as-you-go pricing model. i.e. you only pay for cloud services you use and for the time you use it (consumption based model) instead of the huge capital cost involved in having servers on-site, Thus, this helps reduce the operating costs.
Check out the total cost of ownership calculator (this will give you a comparison of the cost of running your resources on-site versus on the cloud) and the Azure Pricing calculator (this would give you a way by which you can simulate various configurations and know how much it would cost per month to run your resources on Microsoft Azure)
High Availability
Azure has more regions than any other cloud providers. An Azure region consists of a set of data centres connected through a low-latency network. Some of this regions is made up of three availability zones. Availability zones are separate data centres running on separate electricity, cooling and internet, just incase something affects the power supply of one availability zone, the other two will still run efficiently.
Azure Regions (Source: Microsoft Blogs)
Availability Zones Explained (Source: Microsoft Blogs)
Thanks to these regions and availability zones, Azure has the ability to provide a continuous user experience with no apparent downtime. You can easily deploy apps to regional data centres around the globe, thus ensuring that your customers always have best performance within their region
Scalability & Elasticity
Applications can easily scale to increase or decrease compute, storage or any other capacity just with a few clicks. Conventionally, if you need to increase your capacity, you would need to purchase more computers, servers, CPUs, hard-drive, but with Azure, you can easily do this in minutes
Additionally, this resources can auto-scale, ensure your applications to always have the resources they need. Thus, when traffic or load is high or low on your application, resources will increase or decrease their capacity automatically, ensure high availability and cost savings
Scaling up and Scaling out applications (Source: Microsoft Blogs)
Disaster Recovery
Through data replication and geo-distribution, data is always safe in the event of any disaster that affects a region
Easy Management
Through the azure portal, users can easily configure and deploy resources to Azure via a easy-to-use GUI.
An overview of the Azure Portal (Source: techcomminity.microsoft.com)
There are other methods of deploying resources, through Azure Powershell, Azure CLI, Azure Resource Manager Template
Licensing/ Compatibility issues
The use of on-premises infrastructure comes with licensing requirements, the licensing requirements for the Server Operating system and other Application software can be very complex and difficult to maintain. In addition, it is difficult to implement some solutions from third party providers as compatibility issues have to be considered. However, with cloud solutions, Azure cloud allows you to use Microsoft licence, which makes it easy to track licenses and it is very easy to find and use third-party solutions respectively.
To conclude, Azure provides more than 100 services that enable you to do everything from running your existing applications on a virtual machine, to launching new software among others. Azure also provides AI and machine learning services that can naturally communicate with users through vision, hearing and speech. It also provides storage, compute and other services that can naturally grow on-demand.
Therefore, I believe that companies today should explore the possibilities that Microsoft Azure provides and see how it can be configured to suit their needs
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