Cloud computing is fast gaining momentum in today’s dynamic business landscape. The scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness of cloud-based deployments propel its demand among future-focused enterprises looking to drive business agility.
Case in point: According to a study conducted on 800 companies by RightScale, the cloud adoption rate among large-scale organisations is over 94%. 54% of the evaluated enterprises plan to migrate their workloads to the public cloud computing platform in the next 12 months.
The increasing number of businesses migrating to the cloud is expected to make the global cloud computing market surpass $2297.37B by 2032.
Among others, Microsoft Azure is a powerful and comprehensive cloud platform. In this article, we’ll navigate the pros and cons of Microsoft Azure.
What is Microsoft Azure?
Formerly known as Windows Azure, Azure is a cloud computing platform and an online portal delivered by the tech giant Microsoft Corp.
It’s one of the widely used cloud infrastructures that support various workloads.
MS Azure provides enterprises of all sizes – including some Fortune 500 companies – with on-demand delivery of cloud computing services and resources. The widely used Azure’s cloud services/resources are networking, databases, storage facilities, security, data management, media services, developer tools, application integration, virtual machines (VM), analytics, and many more. In addition, this cloud infrastructure can be used for hosting websites, conducting AI and ML tasks, etc.
Azure supports OpenAI through Azure OpenAI and makes OpenAI’s popular language models – such as GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, and Embeddings model series – available via its REST APIs. Its global network of data centres in various locations makes Azure a powerful tool to develop, run, access, and manage cloud applications and services.
Microsoft Azure Services
Let’s elaborate on three of the most used Azure services: computing, networking, and data storage.
Computing
Azure cloud offers a range of computing services used to modify VMs, cloud functions, and services for streamlined app development.
Cloud Services
One of the key services under Azure’s computing suite is Azure Cloud Services. It enables developers to package and deploy easily configurable and scalable cloud-based applications across multiple VMs. Furthermore, infrastructure management tasks, such as application health monitoring and load balancing, are taken care of by Azure, enabling developers to focus on application development solely.
Function
The serverless cloud computing solution offered by Azure Functions enables developers to build apps leveraging a range of programming frameworks. With this suite in place, they are free from the hassle of deploying and maintaining servers – Azure Function infrastructure comes with all essential resources to keep your apps running optimally.
It is an event-driven model – more specifically, a function is a self-contained code initiated with a specific event or trigger. This distributed event-based architecture facilitates app development by allowing for modular and scalable application design, where each function performs a distinct task or responds to a discrete event.
The benefits are many – it promotes loose coupling between components, enabling independent scaling and updates.
With fewer codes to write and less infrastructure to manage, developers can also slash a significant amount of costs.
Virtual Machines
Azure provides developers with a slew of operating systems, such as Linus, Windows, etc., while developing VMs.
Data Storage
Azure storage offers scalable services for object, block, and file storage to meet your data’s highest demand. These include:
- Blob Storage: It’s Microsoft’s highly scalable and cost-effective object storage system used for storing unstructured data – text and binary data (video, images, etc.) – in the cloud
- Disk Storage: Azure Disk Storage is Microsoft’s durable and high-performance, block storage that stores your business-critical applications. It’s specially designed for Azure Virtual Machines and Azure VMware Solution and supports data storage on both HDDs and SSDs.
- Queue Storage: Azure Queue Storage service allows for storing and transferring large numbers of messages. A queue may contain millions of messages where a single message can be up to 64 KB in size. Working as the Web-Queue-Worker architectural style, it creates asynchronous communication among different elements of an application.
- Table Storage: Azure Table Storage is Microsoft’s NoSQL database for storing non-relational structured data in the cloud environment. It comes with a schemaless design – you can store a set of entities in a single table. A single entity comprises a set of properties and a name-value pair.
Azure Networking Services
Microsoft offers a range of networking services through Azure aiming at providing augmented customer experiences in today’s cloud-first environment. Microsoft’s networking services can work in various environments like multi-cloud, edge, and on-premise. They can be used together or separately.
- Azure Virtual Network: Azure Virtual Network (Vnet) provides a highly protected, segmented, and isolated environment to operate your VVMs and applications, with high-end control over traffic between subnets.
- Azure Load Balancer: Azure offers a built-in Load Balancer for VMs and cloud services to help build highly scalable apps. The automatic load-balancing of network traffic ensures low latency and high performance while significantly boosting app uptime.
- Azure Application Gateway: Azure Application Gateway is a scalable, platform-managed Application Delivery Controller as a Service (ADCaaS) and web traffic load balancer of OSI layer 7. It comes with Azure firewalls as built-in and can be controlled through the company’s APIs.
How Does Microsoft Azure Work?
Microsoft Azure is one of the leading public cloud platforms that has four service models: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and serverless platform.
Users can subscribe to Azure’s pay-as-you-go model that charges them only for the services/resources they use.
Azure operates based on virtualisation technology that mimics computer hardware in software. By leveraging the hypervisor technology – an essential element of virtualisation – it builds, amalgamates, and controls multiple VMs (also called cloud servers) and their virtual hardware instances on a single physical server. Azure is a global network of data centres. Within a data centre infrastructure lie multiple physical servers, each of which consists of server racks, clusters, and blades. The virtualised hardware instances, including the VMs, are operated and handled on these physical servers. These physical servers deliver the computing power and resources required to execute the virtualised instances. By using hypervisor-based virtualisation technology, Azure computing platform enables scalability and efficient resource utilisation.
Some physical servers also operate a fabric controller – a cloud management software – that optimises service allocation, manages server fails, monitors server health, etc. Each instance of this software is linked to a cloud orchestration software, also called the front-end, that hosts Azure RESTful APIs, internal databases, and web services. These services are responsible for conducting various Azure functions.
In short, the network of servers and hardware in Azure operates its highly convoluted cluster of distributed applications that orchestrates the functions and configurations of its visualised hardware and software instances on Azure servers. The driving force behind Azure’s robustness is its high-end server orchestration capability that manages tasks, such as scaling, load balancing, VM provisioning, etc. Thus, users are freed from hardware maintenance.
The combination of virtualisation and distribution application technologies makes Azure a highly powerful, scalable, and flexible cloud computing platform.
Now, let’s go through the pros and cons of using Microsoft Azure cloud provider.
Microsoft Azure Pros
According to a study, roughly 56% of enterprises globally rely on Microsoft Azure for their cloud services. As a result, the demand as well as the market share of this cloud service provider is upsurging.
Case in point: In 2022, Microsoft Azure was in the second position in the cloud computing market, holding a 23% market share. However, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) topped the list controlling 32% of the market. Azure was followed by Google Cloud platform with a 10% market share.
Let’s look through the benefits of Azure that are driving its demand. Azure offers many advantages. A few of them are:
High Availability
Microsoft Azure has more than 200 data centres on a global scale. The platform’s vast network of data centres enables it to be highly available and offer low-latency services compared to other cloud systems. With Azure, you get a service level agreement (SLA) of 99.95% uptime, which renders a downtime of not more than five hours a year. It means that even if the data centre hosting your application fails, your workload will be shifted to other data centres to keep them always up and running.
In addition, deploying data centres in more than 60+ regions with multiple availability zones helps Azure reach a pool of users while ensuring high performance.
Microsoft Azure Security
Microsoft claims that Azure is highly secured. It offers multi-layered, built-in security controls across physical data centres, operations, and infrastructure to help protect your hybrid cloud and multi-cloud systems. In addition, the high-end threat intelligence, threat protection, and monitoring services, such as Azure Security Center, ensure potential threats are mitigated before turning into data breaches.
The company also covers multiple compliance certifications (50+), for example, IRS, GDPR, HIPAA, and FERPA. It also enables stringent access control, multifactor authentication, network security protocols, and robust data encryption standards.
Cost Optimisation
Like other high-end cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure features a slew of cost-saving functionalities. For example, the auto-scaling feature with this cloud platform enables automatic upscaling/downscaling of cloud resources based on user demand. Thus, users can avoid resource over-provisioning and pay only for those they use.
In addition, Azure comes with reserved instances and on-demand capacity reservations for Azure VMs. Users who opt for reserved instances make upfront commitments to use Azure VMs for one or three years. In this process, they are charged a significantly lower hourly rate compared to the PAYG model and slash a significant amount off their bills.
Disaster Recovery and Back Up
Azure cloud platform comes with end-to-end backup and disaster recovery services to ensure no business-critical data is lost in case a disaster or system crash/failure occurs. For example, Azure Site Recovery(ASR) and Azure Backup are highly secure, resilient, cloud-native, and cost-effective services that can be integrated with on-prem data protection tools. These services can ensure on-time and orchestrated recovery of business operations after they fail for some reason. For example, ASR features real-time data replication and recovery capabilities that enable data replication from on-premises Azure VMs to Azure Cloud without fail. The immediate failover and failback it enables ensure minimum data loss and downtime. In addition, it also ensures the system promptly returns to the primary data source once it’s restored after a disaster. The result is uninterrupted business continuity.
Interoperability
Interoperability is when products from multiple vendors can seamlessly integrate and exchange data. Microsoft Azure features interoperability. It facilitates the development and implementation of interoperable applications that expand cloud and on-premise infrastructure. It means that Azure allows enterprises to integrate on-prem systems with Microsoft Azure cloud services.
The integration and data exchange between Azure and remote services is enabled by open standard protocols such as SOAP, XML, HTTP, and REST for web service and network communication supported by Azure.
Analytics and Intelligence Capabilities
Microsoft Azure delivers a range of intelligent tools to help dig deeper into a massive trove of raw data for real-time streaming, data warehousing, and advanced analytics on big data. Services such as Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Lake Analytics, Azure Stream Analytics, and more enable enterprises to process and interpret massive troves of structured and unstructured data, and develop analytics models.
In addition, Azure is the only cloud environment that comes with Bots, Machine Learning, Blockchain as a Service (BaaS), and Cognitive API capabilities to help develop advanced and intelligent apps.
Furthermore, Azure also offers SQL and NoSQL data services that offer flexible data storage and querying.
Microsoft Azure Cons
Some cons of Microsoft Azure that enterprises should consider before investing in this cloud vendor are:
Complexity
A complete cloud computing platform with more than 200 services, Azure has a steeper learning curve and is quite difficult to use for many users. It is designed for large-scale enterprises and may be an expensive option for self-hosting. It offers granular control over pricing, which is why a lot of elements in Azure are separated. The granular control allows for fine-tuning features and effective setting configuration for performance optimisation. Even a single modification in setting can lead to a substantial amount of cost savings. However, it requires expertise to ensure optmised settings and configuration in Azure platfrom. It means that enterprises must train their staff to ensure they avoid over-provisioning resources and can effectively operate Azure services.
Data Transfer
Almost all cloud infrastructures, including Azure, charge their users separately for data transfer. These hidden fees often stack up the costs.
Security Concern
Security is the biggest concern with cloud-based system deployments. Even though Azure implements high-end security standards and strong cybersecurity controls, it’s still not immune to cyber scams, such as malware injection, DDoS attacks, etc.
Recently, Microsoft detailed its plan to overhaul its cybersecurity measures with AI and automation after the Azure cloud was hard-hit by a cyberattack.
With that said, experts suggest users stay vigilant and have proper high-end security policies in place to ensure their workloads in the Microsoft Azure platform can’t be breached easily.
Poor Customer Support
Despite being the perennial favorite of a wide pool of users, Microsoft doesn’t offer high-end customer service. However, companies moving their mission-critical workloads, systems, or data to the cloud need immediate support for troubleshooting in case a technical issue or server malfunction occurs.
Requires Management
Despite being a highly flexible cloud computing platform, Azure doesn’t offer data centre management. System maintenance and monitoring tasks such as patching or server monitoring are on the users, which compels companies to hire IT experts.
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