The Soundness of Microsoft Azure
In the modern digital world, the future always lies ahead of cloud computing pathway and Microsoft has achieved this by introducing the future, Microsoft Azure. With Azure, it has the ability to provide on cloud services and able to act as infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and as well as software as a service. Infrastructure as a service basically provides all the on premise solution to an organization. How? Today with Microsoft Azure, organization will be able to host a server in the cloud without any on premise hardware and etc. However, there is a catch, it requires a stable and fast Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection between the Microsoft Datacenter and the organization itself. As a result, Microsoft introduced a new element called “ExpressRoute”. With ExpressRoute, organization will be having the ability to acquire a dedicated, secure and reliable connection to Microsoft Datacenter. This will definitely boost up performance and security. As for platform as a service, Microsoft Azure provides a platform for organization to run their applications all in the cloud. For example, application developers will be able to develop their web applications using Microsoft Azure and use it as a platform to run the application. Other than that, Microsoft Azure can also be software as a service. With this, mobile application developers will be able to distribute their application by using Microsoft Azure itself and the distribution may be able to commence worldwide. However, before diving any deeper into Microsoft Azure, there are basics steps required to make all these happen. How to get started?
Virtual Machine Deployment
First thing first, learning how to deploy the virtual machine is vital as virtual machine will basically host your entire application, web application, and etc. To deploy a virtual machine, you’ll be able to see a virtual machine tab on your left once you get Microsoft Azure started on your web browser. Give it a click and you will be able to see something similar as shown in the figure below.
One of the major strengths in using Microsoft Azure is that, it basically provide the most updated operating system in which, you can eventually deploy or install the operating system right away from the Azure portal itself. Therefore, there is no need to grab your own paid operating system and deploy it into the virtual machine. The list of operating systems are shown as the figure below.
Also, one of the major advantages of Microsoft Azure is that, it is highly scalable. In another sense, you will be able to scale and manage your entire infrastructure at any time and any place. For example, you will be able to scale down the CPU specification at any time you want as shown in the figure below. Therefore, you basically only pay on what you used. Well, “Pay as you use” is also another major contributing factor on why you should migrate to Azure.
Cloud Service Next
deploying a cloud service is vital too. Without deploying a cloud service, you will not be able to deploy the virtual machine. Cloud service is basically acting as a server rack in your on premise infrastructure. If you want the virtual machines to store in a single rack all together in your on premise infrastructure, then you would need to do the same in the cloud by deploying all your virtual machines in the same cloud service. By doing this, you will be able to do things like “Availability Set”. Availability Set allows you to define a schedule to ensure the virtual machines are available whenever you need them or you want them to shut down at certain timing. However to do all these, you would need to define it while deploying the virtual machine as shown in the figure below.
Once the virtual machine is configured and deployed successfully, the status of the virtual machine will switch to “Running” as shown in the figure below. Whenever a production is going on, the status for that particular cloud service will also be shown as “Running” as shown in figure 5.
Whenever a virtual machine is running, it also literally means that your Microsoft Azure’s credits is actually decreasing hour-by-hour basis. Thus, please shut down the virtual machine whenever it is not in production. To learn more about how Windows Azure can help your organization, please contact us at the link below: Contact US!