All the fundamental Azure concepts, jammed into one - Part I : The Cloud

What is / Why cloud computing?

In simple words,

• Someone else own the server
• You are responsible for configuring your cloud services and code.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services such as servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence over the internet.

In traditional approach organizations use to own on-premises data centers that they use to manage. This approach use to cost organizations Capital expenditure or in simple words money and resources. They are suppose to pay Software license fees, Implementations cost, Configuration cost, spend money on training, physical security of the data centers, on hardware (which includes Server cost, storage cost, Network cost, Backup and Archive cost, etc), on IT Personal and on maintenance of systems. Also in order to scale datacenter capacity additional cost of new devices, more storage, etc. Clouds like AWS, Azure or Google cloud saves the physical cost and the organizations only have to bear Operational Expenditure like

• Leasing software and customizing features,
• Training employees in cloud services,
• Paying for cloud support,
• And you are billed as per compute and storage usage.

Types of Cloud Computing

1. SaaS - Software as a Service : A product this is run and managed by the service provider. For example, Gmail, Salesforce, Office 365 etc. You just focus on using the software service.
2. PaaS - Platform as a Service : Here you focus on development and management of your application and do not worry about configuring the OS, understanding hardware, etc. For example, Heroku, Google App engine etc.
3. IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service : Here you have access to networking features, computers and data storage space. However you do not have to worry about data center, IT staff to manage that data center, hardware devices, etc. For example, Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS etc.

Different Cloud deployment models

1. Public cloud (or Cloud-native) - Everything is built on cloud provider (servers, storage and other resources) and the services are offered over the internet. They key advantage is that the organization do not have to bear capital expenditure to scale and they just pay for what they use.
2. Private cloud (or On-premises) - Everything is built on organization's own datacenter. This datacenter can be operated by the organization itself or outsourced. However the resources will only be used by your or your organization exclusively. Advantage of private cloud is organizations have complete control over resources and security. However since with great power comes great responsibilities, organizations are responsible for hardware updates and maintenance.
3. Hybrid cloud - This use both on-premises and cloud service provider. It combines the public as well as private cloud by allowing data and applications to be shared between them. This provide better flexibility, organizations can determine where to deploy and run the applications.
4. Cross cloud- This refers to using multiple cloud providers.

Now lets understand the role of Microsoft Azure

What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure or Azure is a private/public cloud platform by Microsoft. With help from Azure, you have everything you need to build, deploy and manage your application and IT needs. Azure provides 100+ services that let you to do everything from running your existing applications on virtual machines, to solutions and tools to develop your application.

In the upcoming posts we'll examine the various concepts, resources, and terminology that are necessary to work with Azure.

Stay tuned.