I’m sure you’ve heard of Microsoft, but what is Azure cloud computing? Azure lets you design, deploy, and manage apps quickly without buying or maintaining the underlying infrastructure. Azure’s cloud resources meet your security and regulatory standards and are easy to configure for your company’s needs.
In this post we’ll look at the main features of cloud computing Azure and discuss their pros and cons to help you decide if Azure is right for you.
Understanding Azure’s strengths and weaknesses is essential before committing to a cloud platform—especially one at this scale. A thorough Microsoft Azure pros and cons analysis can help you weigh factors like pricing, performance, and ecosystem fit against your organization’s specific needs. With that evaluation in mind, let’s first establish exactly what Microsoft Azure is, what it offers, and where it stands in today’s competitive cloud market.
What is Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure, formerly Windows Azure, is a popular cloud platform with around 200 services like networking, storage, compute, and analytics. These services help you design, test, and manage programs using Microsoft’s global data centers.
Among the service models Azure supports, Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of the most immediately recognizable — it’s the model behind everyday tools like Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365. With SaaS, the provider handles everything from infrastructure to application maintenance, leaving users to simply log in and get to work. A solid grasp of software as a service delivery model helps clarify why organizations so frequently choose it as an entry point into cloud adoption before exploring the broader spectrum of service models.
It supports SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS solutions to choose from and helps users scale their existing application to run on the public cloud environment.
Since its development, Azure has evolved rapidly and became the second-largest public cloud environment— just following the market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) and ahead of Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
The global cloud market was worth $274.79 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow by 19.1% yearly from 2021 to 2028. And according to Statista, while AWS has held 31% of the market share, Azure and Google Cloud have successfully served 22% and 8% of the total public cloud users in 2021, respectively.
Microsoft says about 95% of Fortune 500 companies and government organizations use Azure for its privacy, compliance, and cloud services. This includes companies like eBay, Boeing, Samsung, BMW, and Travelocity.
In recent years, many leading enterprises have chosen Microsoft Azure for hybrid solutions because it syncs easily with legacy Microsoft tools that companies have used for decades.
History of Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure started its journey by the middle of 2000, aiming to power up users’ experience. At that time, Amazon was already launched and serving with its AWS services, and Microsoft was heading at a breathtaking speed to catch the cloud market.
Announced in October 2008 as “Project Red Dog,” Azure launched with five key services: networking, compute and storage, Microsoft SQL, .NET Services, Live Services, SharePoint Services, and Dynamics CRM Services.
Microsoft launched Windows Azure for commercial use in February 2010. It grew to become a market leader with a wide range of services and support for many coding languages and operating systems.
In 2014, Microsoft renamed its cloud service to Microsoft Azure. The platform aims to support building and running services with an open-source ecosystem through a unified codebase.
In 2014, Microsoft Azure had made notable leaps in customer experience. By 2018, Azure sprang up as a robust and stable cloud platform for businesses of all sizes that focus on bringing new solutions to life by designing and deploying them across various cloud environments, at the edge or on-premises, using the frameworks and tools they prefer.
How Does Microsoft Azure Work
Cloud infrastructure is a collection of physical servers in data centers worldwide that deliver virtual hardware to users.
Let’s look over how cloud technology manages thousands of instances simultaneously.
Like other cloud environments, Microsoft Azure uses virtualization technology with Hypervisor software to avoid tight coupling between hardware and the OS. A Cloud Hypervisor is software that enables the distribution of a cloud vendor’s memory and physical compute resources over multiple VMs (Virtual Machine).
- A hypervisor software creates a virtual environment, also called instances, and abstracts the physical computer resources into a centralised pool that can be provisioned, shared, and assigned as required, allowing multiple VMs to run on the same physical machine simultaneously (host or bare metal hardware)
- A Virtual Machine is a virtualised instance of a computer that can mimic the functionalities of a real computer and run any compatible operating systems and applications.
To understand how Azure works, let’s look at the hardware in cloud data centers:
- As I have already mentioned, a cloud data center includes server sets sitting in racks that collectively form a cluster.
- These clusters have their own network switch and server blades for network connectivity and a PDU ( power distribution unit) to power the servers.
- Most servers run hypervisor software or virtual hardware instances, while some run fabric controllers (cloud management software).
- Virtual instances of the fabric controller connect to servers running Orchestration software, also called the front end. This front end hosts RESTful APIs, cloud resources, and internal Azure databases to create a fully functional cloud platform.
- The front end responds to user requests made through web APIs, like accessing VMs and Azure services.
- When a user requests an Azure cloud resource, the front end checks if the user is authorized. If yes, it instructs a database to find a server rack with the required capability and functionality. Once a server cluster with the necessary capacity is located, the front-end commands the fabric controller specified for that cluster to assign the requested resource.
So basically, Microsoft Azure is a network of physical and virtual servers and hardware. It runs shared programs that manage the operation and configuration of software and virtual hardware resources.
What makes Azure so impressive and persuasive is its Orchestration. It allows end-users to leverage the power of the public cloud fully by handling everything: from system maintenance to hardware upgrades.
Technical Details of Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing
Supported OS
- Linux
- Microsoft Windows
- iOS
- Android
Deployment
- On-premises
Pricing Model
- Free
- Quote-based
Customer Types
- Large companies
- Mid-size enterprises
- Small startups
available Integration for Azure
You can effortlessly integrate Azure’s scalable and highly available applications with:
- SmarterU LMS
- TalentLMS
- Asset Bank
- Mindflash
- Gluu.biz
- MediaValet
- Mobile Field Report
- OneSoft Connect
- Datadog
- NetDispatcher
- Cube
- KISSFLOW
- Albino anyCloud
- Actionspace
- OpsGenie
- Dropbox
- Chef
Services Offered by Cloud Computing Azure
Let’s deep down into this cloud platform of limitless potential and unlimited possibilities to better understand its services and offers. Let’s look over some of its leading services:
Azure Compute
This service group allows businesses to provision VMs within minutes, ensures higher availability by autoscaling and accelerating application development via a serverless architecture. What is more impressive is that Azure’s PaaS compute service set enables developers to generate microservices of one functionality that can be coupled together to build a fully functional cloud application.
The options include:
- Azure Virtual machines.
- Azure Containers Instances
- Azure Kubernetes Service
- Azure App Service
- Serverless computing (Functions)
Azure Networking
This service set enables businesses to build hybrid cloud frameworks to leverage the power of public and private cloud models and boost system flexibility by shifting workloads between the two cloud environments linking to their companys’ cloud resources through Azure ExpressRoute securely.
The components include:
- Azure Load Balancer
- Azure Virtual Network
- Azure traffic manager
- Azure Express Route
- Azure DNS
- Azure CDN
- Azure VPN Gateway
Azure Storage
The virtual datacenters of Microsoft offer businesses rapid connectivity and a more scalable IT system without requiring them to deploy any hardware on-site. So you can develop large-scale applications, scale them as required, and ensure automatic data balancing using Azure’s top-notch storage service.
Moreover, Azure encrypts the data in the Azure cloud, making it accessible only via HTTPS and HTTP. Azure Storage service is compatible with multiple coding languages like Java, Python, .NET, Node.js, PHP, etc.
The components include:
- Azure Table Storage
- Azure Queue Storage
- Azure Blob Storage
- Azure File Storage
- Azure Database
Azure supports a variety of fully managed PaaS relational, in-memory, and NoSQL databases spanning open-source and proprietary engines to meet the demands of advanced application developers.
Azure Database services power up your app development process by implementing auto system management, embedded intelligence, auto-scalability, and threat management functionalities.
Azure Database types are:
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure DocumentDB
- Azure Redis Cache
Microsoft Azure Features
Azure aims to provide users with tools and solutions essential to handle mission-critical workloads and app development that was once highly expensive to use and required users to go through a lot of hassles. Microsoft Azure is a market-leading cloud vendor, serving end-users with IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS to promptly upgrade their IT system and meet the evolving business requirements.
Let’s look over some cutting-edge features of this widely adopted cloud:
Disaster Recovery
Microsoft Azure is an excellent disaster recovery and backup tool that many businesses dream to implement. But what makes Azure disaster recovery service so impressive? It is because of Azure’s advanced site recovery, excellent flexibility, and built-in integration facility.
Azure is intrinsically resilient and flexible – no matter where the data is created, Azure can back it up on any operating system and in all programming languages. You can also schedule backups to occur monthly, weekly, or daily.
Using a tape drive for local backup limits your ability to recover files and infrastructure quickly in a disaster.
Azure Site Recovery helps keep your company running smoothly with built-in disaster recovery tools. These integrated services are easy to use, improve your on-site backup system, offer long-term data retention, and reduce downtime by allowing offsite VM replication to another Azure region.
Azure’s one-click backup service lets you store data in GRS, LRS, or ZRS. You can mirror data in remote locations and manage backups centrally.
Enterprise-level development tools
With Microsoft Azure, companies can develop, test, implement, and maintain custom mobile and web applications in a fully managed PaaS environment using various development tools. These applications can run on multiple frameworks and VMs, scaling as your service grows.
Azure lets you connect your web application to an on-premise program. This makes resources available to your staff and business associates within your private firewall.
You can use Azure Resource Manager for better app hosting and deployment. Everything, from container orchestration to auto-upgrades, is at your fingertips.
Some notable features of Azure Web Apps are:
- Auto-patching for higher availability
- Constant deployment with GitHub, Git, DevOps, and more
- Azure Load Balancer and Azure AutoScale come in-built for better and auto resource management depending on traffic coming to your web app.
- Linux and Windows OS supported
- Effortless integration with multiple CMS, like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
Some features of Azure Mobile App are:
- Supports Azure Active Directory for single sign-on (SSO) user authentication
- Applications can sync in real-time, even when offline
- Broadcast push notifications
- Effortless social media integration
- Autoscaling to run on thousands of devices simultaneously
Azure Active Directory: Shield Your Business with a Universal Identity System
Azure AD is Microsoft’s cloud-based directory and identity management tool. It lets your staff access your company’s network resources without managing unique login IDs and passwords for each service.
As an administrator, you assign each employee a single username and password. They can then access AD’s pre-integrated SaaS tools like SQL databases, Azure containers, Microsoft 365, Azure portal, or ML.
Now you can offer your employees, whether they are working on-site or remotely, a more uniform, flexible, and well-managed working environment secured with multi-factor authentication, access governance, and SSO.
Azure IoT Industry Solutions
Microsoft azure is the preference of modern businesses that strive to transform digitally through harnessing the power of IoT and AI.
With Azure’s open edge-to-cloud IoT tools, consolidating your company’s structured and unstructured data from multiple sources and turning your vision into actuality has become easier now.
Thanks to Azure IoT Hub that has made monitoring and controlling IoT tools and the millions of devices interacting with them and extracting actionable insights effortless like never before. You can even bring your complete IoT tool on-premises on Azure Stack with IoT Hub and develop hybrid applications for better flexibility that can run over your data centers.
Other Azure IoT solutions are:
- IoT Edge: enables you to deploy image recognition, complicated device data processing and analysis, ML, and other high-value Artificial Intelligence locally on IoT edge devices instead of in the cloud.
- IoT Central: Simplifies the development and management of other IoT solutions.
- Azure IoT Solution Accelerators: Offers pre-configured tools and customisable templates to manage device simulation and connectivity, remote monitoring, data processing and analytics, etc.
- Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning: To provide remote access to the essential IoT Hub requiring no user interaction
Pros of Microsoft Azure
- Comes with DADSC-based (Detect, Assess, Diagnose, Stabilise and Close) security system to offer top-notch multi-level data security
- Integrable with other Microsoft services.
- Supports remote and on-site user management
- Offers excellent documentation around all Azure cloud computing services
- Proactive and responsive customer assistance via email, tickets, and training
- Azure cloud comes with automatic UX and HMI layout.
Cons of Microsoft Azure
- Lower hardware reliability than AWS
- No over-the-phone or live chat service
- Migrating from other cloud solutions to Azure is a bit complicated
Cost of Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing
How much Azure cloud computing may cost you depends on what services you decide to use and how long you use them. Azure is a quote-based service that involves no upfront payment.
To evaluate your Azure billing, you must decide what features your business would require and the involved transactions number.
For example, while Azure VM may cost you around $0.02/node/hour, you need to spend $0.02/10,000 transactions for data storage.
