HIGHLIGHTS
Is Microsoft Azure the right option for you? Boasting an impressive feature set, we pick 4 that could help you make your move.
You can read our previous article Before we delve into the depths of Azure as a cloud platform, it is good to know that Azure comes jam-packed with a lot of features. Whether you’re a normal user, or a developer, you’ll have no problem in finding the features that are right for you. So what we’re going to try and do in this particular article is to cover a couple of primary features that would be common to a majority of the users.
VIRTUAL NETWORKING
And according to their Service Law Agreement, Azure promises its users a 99.9% uptime for its VPNs, making it very attractive for the approximate charge of Rs.2 an hour with the ‘pay as you go’ plan.
Command line automation is a powerful tool that Azure provides. This tool enables you to automate the creation and management of Azure mobile services – which is very crucial for system administrators. Broad scripting and automation support is also provided for the developers and system administrators that require it.
Therefore, with Azure the user can combine into a single script or file, the individual commands to automate, create and verify the process, thus automating the entire process of creating and managing mobile services as a whole. And with Azure, it doesn’t matter what the Operating System is – installing the Command Lines tools puts everybody on the same platform.
All that is required to do this is to have an Azure account that has the Azure mobile services features enabled.
One of the key benefits that Microsoft Azure delivers is the ability to rapidly scale the application in response to changes in demand. Azure has the ability to configure itself in a way that minimizes the cost for the computing performance that the application demands. Basically, when the user runs an application in Azure, the roles run as role instances (think of them as virtual machines), and these can be set depending on the number of role instances that the user wants – the more instances you have, the more computing power you have available, but the more it costs you. Azure’s autoscaling features comes into the picture here, where it configures it in a way that would optimize the performance for the user in terms of cost and computing power. Scaling an application can be done in two ways – average CPU usage, and Queue messages. The first one indicates that if the application uses more than the defined CPU power, it can automatically increase its resources. And the second one lets the platform be scaled automatically depending on the number of queued messages. Azure also allows for manual scaling keeping in mind that the priorities of different users would differ.
Frameworks bridge the gap between development and actual deployment. Microsoft Azure supports quite a lot of frameworks to work with, ensuring that the user can develop in the language most suited to him/her. Software Development Kits are freely available for applications running on PHP, .NET, Node.js etc. The frameworks that are supported by Azure are ever growing, and currently include the likes of Apache Ant, CentOS, Debian, Git, Joomla, Magento, Memcached, MySQL, Nginx, Ruby on Rails etc.
You can read the next article in the series here and a bonus article here.