This integrated cloud computing operating system makes it easy to manage scalable web applications on the internet and gives you the freedom to build and deploy anything, anywhere, using the tools, applications, and frameworks you want. Elasticity, scalability, and cost savings are some of the major advantages that Azure offers, but discover further how you can be extremely productive if you choose to use this intelligent infrastructure.
Azure is a professional platform for cloud services, offered by Microsoft, which allows you to quickly build, deploy and securely manage scalable applications. The project was announced in October 2008 and developed under the code name “Red Dog Project”. Officially, Microsoft launched the system on February 1, 2010, under the name Windows Azure, after which, on March 25, 2014, it changed its name to Microsoft Azure.
Thanks to its advanced features, Azure can start virtual machines, SQL databases or create backups for existing resources and much more without worrying about equipment and software failures or obsolescence. This Public Cloud platform allows almost any kind of technological approach, whether it is IaaS, PaaS or even SaaS solutions, Windows or Linux servers or other technological application. As with other cloud computing technologies, Microsoft Azure aims to simplify IT management and minimize ongoing expenses and upfronts.
Azure's tools, pre-built templates, and managed services help you quickly build and manage enterprise, mobile, web, and IoT (Internet of Things) applications. The system is designed to create, distribute, and upgrade web applications without requiring users to deploy or maintain expensive resources. Hosting and environment management are done and maintained in Microsoft Data Centers. As a cloud computing service, Azure works similarly to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform.
ITraditionally, companies and organizations of all kinds would host their own infrastructure using their own web server on their own hardware. They would need to have staff to manage the technology, a solid internet connection, or more server hardware for more power, all of which incur significant expenses. Cloud computing means that organizations only pay for access to a significant amount of computing resources provided by Microsoft, rather than using their own equipment.
Azure technology provides a directory of hundreds of different services that you can use, including databases, backups, email servers, full virtual machines, file storage, user directories, and services for mobile and web applications. Microsoft Azure provides a way to use remote computing resources and is a service suitable for companies, organizations, and even individuals.
Microsoft Azure makes its resources available to companies and organizations via the Internet. It supports any operating system and a wide range of programming languages, offers access to integrated services so that users can manage infrastructure much faster by executing a large number of tasks and through significant financial savings.
The technology offers full flexibility in choosing resources, but also the possibility of scaling the characteristics and volumes of these resources in just a few clicks, depending on the dynamics of each user's needs. KodingTech, a company that uses cutting-edge technologies to provide personalized and integrated IT services, has identified the following specific benefits of Microsoft Azure:
Azure offers technical support for customers from all regions of the world. In Romania, the technical support center benefits from a large number of specialists, most of whom are Romanian, and covers level 3 support for most Microsoft cloud products. This is a major benefit, which KodingTech uses whenever needed. We are also talking about sales/presales support with local presence – direct support channel from Microsoft subsidiaries in Romania and Ireland for optimized solutions based on Microsoft Azure from both a technical and cost perspective.
The authentication and security organization system of Microsoft Azure services is extremely flexible and allows for the easiest Hybrid-Cloud approach. It can be used either to connect to classic local resources (Windows Server), or if you use hybrid solutions by design such as KodingTech K2S or connect to a Private Cloud solution based on VMware or Hyper-V.
Locally, companies and organizations have the opportunity to run Microsoft Azure Stack on their servers. KodingTech is the first Microsoft partner to implement a Microsoft Azure Stack solution in Romania.
Compared to other providers, Microsoft Azure was designed to allow access to all services, virtual machines and applications in the system, without fear of interruption. Azure is a leader in performance and can offer a service level agreement or SLA of 99.95%, which means continuous monitoring of the health of services, non-stop technical support and approximately 4.38 hours of downtime annually, something that most companies cannot achieve. Microsoft Azure combines the IaaS service, infrastructure as a service, with PaaS, platform as a service.
By following the standard security model of Detect, Assess, Diagnose, Remediate, and Close, Microsoft Azure provides high assurance in terms of data protection. Azure provides multiple layers of protection for the platform and the end user through simple and easy-to-use services.
The Microsoft Azure platform helps reduce costs and is very attractive to many organizations. The cloud environment allows organizations to launch customer applications, as well as internal applications in the cloud, which leads to savings in IT infrastructure and reduced hardware loads. Thus, large investments in the purchase of new software or hardware are avoided, and IT costs can be allocated to other operational expenses.
As we already mentioned, Azure is a professional business technology that offers users complete online access to a multitude of services, applications, and databases.
The goal of the system is to enable companies to constantly change and adapt their own IT infrastructure and to simplify IT management. Here are the most commonly used Microsoft Azure services:
It is a solution that allows to increase the velocity of software project delivery and the usual choice of the KodingTech team. Azure DevOPs is a service that KodingTech uses for project management, which the team configured by design for the Scrum methodology, as a Git versioning solution through Azure Repos, for the purpose of automating deployments through Azure Pipelines, for tracking velocity, bugs or documentation for each project.
This service is used to run virtual machines in the cloud. It is the de facto choice for running mobile, e-commerce, or “demanding” applications. Like many other companies, KodingTech prefers Linux virtual machines, but for the same projects, Linux and Windows machine architectures or “resource groups” can also be used. It is the only large Public Cloud solution provider that allows the provision of machines with “bring your own license” licensing. If you already have a valid Microsoft licensing solution, you do not have to pay again for the cloud machine license.
Microsoft Azure offers backup services for both on-premises and cloud resources. The service is easy to set up, has great pricing, and offers almost infinite storage space at an extremely low cost.
This service offers fast deployment, almost unlimited scaling, huge performance, pay only for what you use, management by Microsoft, included licensing and encryption protection with keys that are only with the user or orchestrated through Azure Key Vault. The databases most often used by KodingTech are Cosmos DB, SQL Server, MySql and PostgreSQL.
Within it, we identify three useful services in managing identity and security processes:
All of these services are easy solutions for quickly running applications in the cloud. They are very helpful whether you want a classic solution, a microservices-based application, or a serverless one.
This service refers to file or object storage solutions. Storage can be done only in the cloud, it can be hybrid storage, application storage or backup storage.
The prices are excellent, the scaling is infinite, and Azure Storage is also useful for distribution services such as Media Services or CDN.
Complete solutions for artificial intelligence and machine learning. Almost anything the user wants can be delivered from Microsoft Azure: Bot Services, Computer Vision, Anomaly Detector, Cognitive Search, ML, Face Detection, Form Recognizer, Speech to Text, Text Analytics, etc. The “best” is yet to come.
Microsoft Azure differentiates itself as a provider with many applications and solutions for IoT scenarios - Internet of Things. The main solutions: Azure IoT Central, Azure IoT Hub, Azure IoT Edge, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Defender for IoT and Windows 10 IoT Core Services.
Microsoft Azure is often used by organizations for data backup and disaster recovery, but it offers a multitude of services and options. Through it, a set of professional cloud services oriented towards different technological scenarios can be accessed, being an excellent solution that every company or organization needs.
