Cloud Computing – Microsoft way

You recognise the buzz when you hear it, let’s take a case of “Cloud computing”, lot of hype and buzz all ready created. So you must be wondering what Microsoft is doing about it? Well, their answer is Azure.

Cloud Computing is an emerging approach and technique for sharing infrastructure both hardware and software, thereby linking large pools of systems together to provide IT services. These ‘IT support services’ are provided from a ‘cloud’ (location invisible to the clients consuming these ‘services’) over the net. As Cloud computing was being defined, and the scope was dawning on people, Microsoft got hands down and introduced their own platform /product offering on cloud computing. The Community Technology Preview (CTP) version of Microsoft cloud offering is already available, and it named as Windows Azure™.

The Azure™ Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centre. It is neither a grid computing, nor another hosting service, nor a packaged software; It is an integrated development, service hosting and management environment maintained by Microsoft. Azure reduces the need for up-front technology investment. It simplifies maintaining and operating applications by providing on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web and connected applications. Infrastructure management is automated with a platform that is designed for high availability and dynamic scaling to match usage needs with the option of a pay-as-you-use pricing model.

Therefore, Developers can quickly and easily create applications running in the cloud by using their existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework.

Its services includes component like Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, Live Services.  Following is the brief description of each service.

Windows Azure - Provides a Windows-based environment for running applications and storing data on servers in Microsoft data centers.
Yes! Your assumption is right, one can develop application locally, than deploy it on Windows Azure service on the cloud. Alternatively you must also be wondering why Microsoft created another operating system Windows Azure; when we already have Windows Server, the reason is very obvious Windows Azure is for the cloud and Windows server is for on-premise application.

Microsoft .NET Services – Provides distributed infrastructure services to cloud-based and local custom applications.

Microsoft SQL Services –  Provides data services in the cloud based on SQL Server

Microsoft Live Services – Provides access to user data and application resources from Microsoft’s Live applications. (keeps Live Services data synchronized across desktops, devices, and the cloud.)

The main challenge here one can easily foresee, is availability. Windows Azure is designed from the ground up to be a fault-tolerant platform. Innovative technology called the Fabric Controller ensures that service availability is not affected even if individual servers fail. Scalability is also addressed; Windows Azure enables developers to scale applications seamlessly, as demand rises and falls.

Azure support & provides an open standards with support for multiple internet protocols, like HTTP, REST, SOAP, and XML.  This will enable users to support non-Microsoft languages and environment platforms. So all the cloud tools are available, you don’t have to learn anything new, your existing .NET skills will help to develop services and solutions for the cloud, which will be simple to deploy, easy to scale and is zero maintenance.

Windows Azure reflects Microsoft's firm commitment on making cloud computing a cost- effective mechanism for addressing the IT challenges.  Let’s see how Azure™ Services Platform performs in the cloud. In future as an developer or an enterprise, some or other way we will be using cloud platform service in our application, so clouds are changing fast, be prepare to be part of it.

 

Comments

[Anil Thakur]

Dear Mr. Nikam,
Good Informative post..
Finally something is getting ready from MS for cloud, when they are planning to launch Azure?
Service availability is the key for success, lets see how this will be managed on Azure.
Will visit often on this blog for more information.

Anil Thakur
Software Head - Panoramic Group Companies

[Hiren]

so far so good on cloud computing...