Microsoft Azure

If you’ve followed Microsoft news, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Microsoft Azure, formerly known as Windows Azure. This cloud computing service is a big part of Microsoft’s business, and it competes with similar services from Amazon and Google.

Cloud Computingl

By “cloud computing”, we don’t mean the vague term that’s often applied to consumer services that store your data on a remote server somewhere. We mean actual computing as a service for companies, organizations, and even individuals who want to take advantage of it.

Cloud computing works a bit differently. Rather than run your own hardware or pay for use of some specific hardware in someone else’s data center, you just pay for access to a massive pool of computing resources provided by Microsoft (or Amazon, or Google). This allows you to host web servers, email servers, databases, file storage servers, virtual machines, user directories, or anything else you might want. When you need more computing resources, you don’t have to purchase physical hardware. The “cloud” shares the hardware and automatically assigns the work, as necessary. You pay for as many computing resources as you need, and not a specific number of hardware servers on a rack somewhere.

Services you deploy in this way can either be public servers available to everyone, or part of a “private cloud” that’s just used in an organization.

What’s the Point?

There’s a much smaller up-front cost when using cloud computing. You don’t have to invest a bunch of money into creating your own data center, purchasing hardware for it, and paying a staff. There’s no risk of overpaying for too much hardware—or buying too little and not having what you need.

Instead, you host whatever you need to host “in the cloud” provided by a service like Microsoft Azure. You pay for only the computing resources you use, as you use them. If you need more, it can instantly scale up to handle high demand. If you need less, you aren’t paying for more than you need.

Everything from a company’s internal email system to public-facing websites and services for mobile apps are increasingly hosted on cloud platforms for this reason.

What Can Microsoft Azure Do?

Microsoft maintains a growing directory of Azure services, with more being added all the time. All the elements necessary to build a virtual network and deliver services or applications to a global audience are available, including:

• Virtual machines. Create Microsoft or Linux virtual machines (VMs) in just minutes from a wide selection of marketplace templates or from your own custom machine images. These cloud-based VMs will host your apps and services as if they resided in your own data center.
• SQL databases. Azure offers managed SQL relational databases, from one to an unlimited number, as a service.This saves you overhead and expenses on hardware, software, and the need for in-house expertise.
• Azure Active Directory Domain services. Built on the same proven technology as Windows Active Directory, this service for Azure lets you remotely manage group policy, authentication, and everything else. This makes moving and existing security structure partially or totally to the cloud as easy as a few clicks.
• Application services. With Azure it’s easier than ever to create and globally deploy applications that are compatible on all popular web and portable platforms. Reliable, scalable cloud access lets you respond quickly to your business’s ebb and flow, saving time and money. With the introduction of Azure WebApps to the Azure Marketplace, it’s easier than ever to manage production, testing and deployment of web applications that scale as quickly as your business. Prebuilt APIs for popular cloud services like Office 365, Salesforce and more greatly accelerate development.
• Visual Studio team services. An add-on service available under Azure, Visual Studio team services offer a complete application lifecycle management (ALM) solution in the Microsoft cloud. Developers can share and track code changes, perform load testing, and deliver applications to production while collaborating in Azure from all over the world. Visual Studio team services simplify development and delivery for large companies or new ones building a service portfolio.
• Storage. Count on Microsoft’s global infrastructure to provide safe, highly accessible data storage. With massive scalability and an intelligent pricing structure that lets you store infrequently accessed data at a huge savings, building a safe and cost-effective storage plan is simple in Microsoft Azure.

Azure Active Directory and Windows 10

Microsoft is also using Azure to extend Windows in some important ways. Traditionally, organizations that wanted to have a central user directory and management of their PCs needed to run their own Microsoft Active Directory server. Now, in addition to the traditional Active Directory software that can be installed on a Windows server, an organization can use Azure Active Directory.

Azure AD is the same sort of thing—but hosted on Microsoft Azure. It allows organizations to have all those centralized administration features without requiring them to host their own Active Directory server (and set up the often complicated infrastructure and access permissions needed to make it work remotely).

These services aren’t identical, but Microsoft is clearly betting that Azure AD is the future. Windows 10 users can join an Azure Active Directory via the “Work Access” feature, and Microsoft’s Office 365 service uses Azure Active Directory to authenticate users.

How Anyone Can Use Azure

Anyone can use Microsoft Azure. Just head to the Azure website and you’ll can sign up for a new account. Each account comes with $200 in credit that you can use over the first 30 days, so you’ll be able to get started and see how Azure works for you. You also get a certain number of free services for the first year, including access to Linux virtual machines, Windows virtual machines, file storage, databases, and bandwidth.

Of course, all of this is really useful to people and organizations who want to host services or develop applications. If you’re just a Windows user—or a user of any other platform—you don’t need to use this stuff. But the developers who create and host your applications often use services like Azure. And if you own a company, you might be able to save some money (and some headaches) by letting Azure handle your infrastructure.