Many users still do not know that Microsoft Azure is a Microsoft cloud product that uses an ever-expanding network of data centers to create, deploy and manage services and applications anywhere. It allows you to add features to an existing network through the platform as a service model (PaaS) and trusts Microsoft to perform computing and network operations using the service infrastructure (IaaS).
Any of these options provides secure and reliable access to cloud data based on Microsoft's proven architecture. Azure provides an ever-expanding suite of products and services designed to meet all needs with an easy-to-manage platform. Consider Microsoft Azure - what it is, and also talk about what users can offer.
Microsoft Azure Technical Features
Microsoft maintains a growing catalog of Azure services, which contains all the elements needed to create a virtual network and provide services or applications to a global audience, including:
- Microsoft or Linux virtual machines (VMs).
- One to unlimited managed SQL relational databases as Microsoft Azure services.
- Azure Active Directory Domain Services based on proven Windows Active Directory technology. Allow you to remotely manage group policies, authentication, and more.
- Application services compatible with all popular web ports and portable platforms.
- Reliable, scalable access to cloud resources allows you to quickly respond to the outflow and influx of information, saving time and money.
- Team Visual Studio Services creates an additional service available as part of the Team Visual Studio service for an integrated application lifecycle management (ALM) solution, which Microsoft Azure is especially valuable in.
- A storage location that allows you to store rarely received data with huge savings.
Self-contained data centers are becoming obsolete and are being replaced by increasingly affordable cloud solutions.
Cloud Platform Benefits
The combination of Microsoft’s extensive infrastructure, continuous development of applications and services, and a strong presence in the global IT market, made Microsoft Windows Azure solutions the choice of two thirds of Fortune 500 companies worldwide. The endless scalability of Azure makes it also suitable for personal use, due to its advantages:
- Flexibility. Using the cloud, new services are offered with the ability to geometrically scale data storage capabilities on the fly. Users claim that there are no competitors for Microsoft Azure.
- Cost. Cloud solutions not only speed up and simplify the addition and scaling of infrastructure, but also make it cheap. Leveraging Microsoft’s expertise, Azure cuts its annual IT budget for users.
- Applications With services such as Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Application Insights, and the scalable Microsoft Azure cloud with both frequent access and cold data requirements, Microsoft is developing and testing mission-critical applications. It also offers significant licensing discounts for migrating existing Microsoft Azure machine learning applications and machine learning, which is a great help to save.
- Disaster Recovery. Another advantage of the cloud is its high-speed and geographically decentralized infrastructure, which creates unlimited possibilities for disaster recovery plans.
Azure Products and Services
As of the end of 2018, Microsoft classifies cloud services using several types of products:
- Computation - allow the user to deploy and manage virtual machines, containers and batch processing, as well as maintain access to remote applications.
- Web use Microsoft Azure - supports the development and deployment of web applications, and also offers features for search, content delivery, application programming interface (API) management, notification and reporting.
- Data storage. This category of services provides scalable cloud storage for structured and unstructured data, and also supports large projects, persistent storage (for containers) and archive storage, for example, for use by Microsoft Azure for students.
Analytical Services
Provides storage, as well as functions for real-time analytics, large data analytics, machine learning, business intelligence (BI), Internet data streams (IoT) and their storage.
Network. This group includes virtual networks, dedicated connections and gateways, as well as services for traffic management and diagnostics, load balancing, domain name hosting (DNS), and network protection against denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Media and Content Delivery Network (CDN). These services include on-demand streaming, digital rights protection, multimedia encoding, playback and indexing.
Hybrid integration. These are services for backing up a server, restoring a site, and connecting private and public clouds.
Identity and Access Management (IAM). These offers ensure that only authorized users gain access to services and help protect encryption keys and other sensitive information in the cloud. Services include Active Directory support and multi-factor authentication (MFA), which is the foundation of Microsoft Azure.
Technologies within the Azure Cloud
Internet services help users receive, monitor and analyze IoT sensors and other devices. Services include notifications, analytics, monitoring and support for coding and execution.
Development services help application makers share code, test, and track potential problems. The Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform supports a number of application programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, .NET, and Node.js. Tools in this category also include support for Visual Studio, software development kits (SDKs), and locking.
These products provide capabilities for identifying and responding to cloud security threats, as well as for managing encryption keys and other sensitive resources.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are a wide range of services that a developer can use to implement machine learning, AI, and cognitive computing capabilities in applications and data sets.
Common Docker and Kubernetes Platforms
Containers - These services help an enterprise create, register, organize, and manage massive amounts of information in the cloud using common platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes.
Database. This category includes service offerings (DBaaS) for SQL and NoSQL, as well as other data instances, such as Azure Cosmos DB and the database for PostgreSQL. They also include SQL Data Warehouse support, caching, hybrid integration, and database migration.
DevOps - This group provides tools for projects and collaboration, such as Visual Studio Team Services, which facilitate the development of DevOps software. This group also offers functions for application diagnostics, integration of DevOps tools and test laboratories for testing and assembly experiments.
Migration - A set of tools helps an organization evaluate the cost of migrating a workload and actually moving workloads from local data centers to the cloud.
Mobile - these products help the developer to create cloud applications for mobile devices, provide notification services, support for background tasks, tools for creating APIs and the ability to associate a geospatial (local) context with data.
Management - These services provide a range of backup, recovery, compliance, automation, planning, and monitoring tools that can help your cloud administrator manage your Azure deployment.
Logging function
Azure comes with built-in monitoring and health alerts, so the user instantly finds out about any performance issues or system crashes.
Intelligent event alert levels:
- Azure Diagnostic Infrastructure - Information on how the cloud network works. The necessary measures are taken to eliminate slowdowns, bottlenecks or service failures.
- Windows IIS Logs View activity on virtual web servers and respond to traffic or login anomaly with data. Azure Builds IIS 7.
- Emergency landfill. Even virtual machines have blue screen issues and other hardware failures that could disrupt any operation. Using this function, you can record emergency dump data and troubleshoot problems.
- Custom error logs. Set Azure alerts to inform the user of error events. This is useful when hosting private applications that generate an internal analysis of operations, so the user can add these errors to the health checklist.
Basic network maintenance tools
Azure supports the user network using the tools necessary to register and monitor errors, diagnose and troubleshoot to ensure uninterrupted service delivery in the cloud.
Even with Azure’s own logging and analytics tools, the amount of data that runs on the network and applications can be huge. The volume, variety, and speed of cloud data should not be underestimated. Using Sumo Logic (a trusted Microsoft partner), managing this data is simple.
The Sumo Logic platform combines logs and metrics from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data in a Microsoft environment. Machine learning algorithms process a huge amount of journal data and indicators, look for anomalies and deviations from the normal patterns of activity, timely warning the user.
With Log Reduce, Log Compare, and Outlier Detection, users extract continuous intelligence from the application stack and respond to operational and security issues.
Sumo Logic’s applications for Azure Audit, Internet Information Services (IIS) provide real-time data about machines and turn them into understandable interactive visualizations to complete the picture.
DR and backup
As with other cloud platforms, some organizations use copy and disaster recovery (DR). In addition, some organizations use Azure as an alternative to their own data center, so as not to invest in local servers. These organizations prefer to run some or all of their business applications.
As of the end of 2018, services are available in 54 regions located in 140 countries. Since services are not available in all regions of the world, Azure users must ensure that the places of loading and storing data comply with all existing requirements for compliance with the laws of the country of residence.
There are four clouds in Germany, two in the United Kingdom, France and Switzerland, one each in Ireland and the Netherlands. China and Australia each have four units, India three, Japan and Korea two each. Hong Kong and Singapore accept the cloud as one region. For the Middle East, South Africa and the UAE, there are two clouds in each region.
Pricing model
Azure mainly uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model and is based on the actual volume of services. If one application uses several services, each includes several price levels. In addition, if the user provides long-term commitments to services such as computing instances, Microsoft offers a discount.
Given the factors associated with the pricing of cloud services, users analyze and manage the cloud service in order to minimize costs. Azure-native tools such as Azure Cost Management can help control, visualize, and optimize cloud computing costs. You can also use third-party tools (Cloudability or RightScale) to manage resource usage and associated costs.
For example, the cost of storage depends on the reservation and distribution parameters. In the central US region, a hot locally redundant block storage (LRS-HOT) with 3 copies in a single data center starts at $ 0.0184 per GB (approximately 1.2 rubles). Geographically redundant storage (GRS-HOT) with 3 copies in one data center and 3 copies in a second geographically remote data center starts at 0.0388 US dollars per GB (2.56 rubles). Read-Access GRS (RAGRS-HOT), which allows you to read access in the second data center, starts at $ 0.046 per GB (about 3 rubles at the current rate).
Instruction manual
The toolbar is the main part of the real estate on the azure portal. It allows you to drag services, counters, and other relevant information onto a web page. You can create several dashboards, for example, for monitoring. It shows the status of Azure services and current billing and focuses on the services included in the application (indicating errors, consoles and logs).
The dashboard may contain information on Azure resources, access to tutorials, as well as links to the Azure Marketplace and details for viewing. To create a toolbar, go to the Azure portal and click the "New toolbar" link, give it a name and start adding tiles to the page.
To open the toolbar, go to the Azure portal and click on the "Share" link, as a result, a sidebar appears. In this area, fill out the necessary information and click the "Publish" button.
Azure will ask the owner to control access to the common dashboard. Before sharing the dashboard, perform security rights. For example, if individual users do not have access to billing information in Azure, then the tile for them will not matter.
Often you need to add resources or their groups, which are not in the gallery of plates. The owner will need to find the group of resources that need to be provided. To do this, select the context menu, and in it - the output element for the toolbar.
To change the color of the portal, double-click an empty area on the toolbar. As a result, various theme colors will appear. Alternatively, you can click the Gear icon at the top of the page and try other colors.