Introduction to Cloud Computing and Azure

Consider a Hotel Room Booking Website. Users can book hotel rooms using this website.

Suppose to keep this website up and running we are making use of inhouse servers. The major issue for this website is there will be more traffic during the holiday season and less during other times. So during holiday seasons we may need more computing power. This can be achieved by adding more servers. However then these additional servers will lie unused during non peak season. Also other challenge regarding the operations of the website is predicting future server needs. Suppose the website becomes suddenly very popular, then adding more servers for this additional load in a short period of time is a very costly affair. Similarly suppose some catastrophe like the corona pandemic occurs and the load is very less then too existing servers which are not required will need to be maintained. Managing inhouse servers also requires trained manpower which again is costly. This is where cloud comes into the picture. Using cloud we can allocate the resources as and when required. When not required these resources can be released.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services-including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence-over the Internet. It offers faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. We typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping lower your operating costs, run our infrastructure more efficiently and scale as your business needs change.

Introduction to Azure

Currently the market is dominated by 3 cloud providers -

• Google Cloud
• AWS
• Microsoft Azure

Azure is a cloud computing platform and an online portal that allows users to access and manage cloud services and resources provided by Microsoft. These services and resources include storing user data and transforming it, depending on users requirements. To get access to these resources and services, all users need to have is an active internet connection and the ability to connect to the Azure portal. Features of Azure -

• Azure was officially launched on February 1, 2010 which is quite later than AWS. But is has covered a lot of ground since then.
• It offers free to start feature, following which user will pay as per usage.
• Nearly 80% of the fortune 500 companies use Azure for their cloud requirements
• Azure has support for multiple programming languages like Java, C3, Node Js
• Among the cloud providers Azure has the highest number of data centers around the world.