Windows Azure, a new development platform for building cloud-based applications.

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Windows Azure, a new development platform for building cloud-based applications.

[articlemaster9]

Windows Azure is a new “Operating System” that Microsoft announced at PDC. They are marketing it as an “Operating System for the cloud”, but what does this really mean? To understand what Azure is and how it is different from Windows Vista you need to know a bit of background on recent computing trends.Gone are the days of companies hosting their own servers in a data centre, with all of the associated costs of maintaining the physical hardware and worrying about backups. Instead it is more economical to have companies like Google, Amazon or Microsoft create giant data centres who then lease computing power to us. These companies don’t purchase individual servers, or even servers by the rack, instead they purchase servers by the shipping container! When a company purchases one of these shipping containers, all they see from the outside are 3 holes: one for power, network and water cooling. This allows them to rapidly add extra computing power and expand data centres with a minimum of fuss. Due to the massive economies of scale that these data centres get, you are now able to go to companies like Amazon and GoGrid.com to rent entire virtual computers for around 10 cents an hour. The possibilities opened up by being able to very quickly and cheaply get processing power are immense. A simple example being an e-commerce website, here a company would usually have to purchase multiple servers to host their website to handle peak load, but will have 80% of their servers sitting there idling. Instead of having to outlay a lot of initial capital on these servers, the same company can instead rent a single server from one of these websites, and scale it up as demand increases (like the holiday season). This way they are only paying for server time they actually need.

However with this cheap raw computing power comes complexity. Now developers need to manually turn these virtual servers on, set up load balances, install applications and maintain security patches, while also updating their code and websites across multiple servers.

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Whoo!!! articlemaster9 Thank you, very very much for that write up/reply.

This explains a lot of stuff to me


Glouds cause rain and snow... LOL

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Originally Posted by articlemaster9

Windows Azure is a new “Operating System” that Microsoft announced at PDC. They are marketing it as an “Operating System for the cloud”, but what does this really mean? To understand what Azure is and how it is different from Windows Vista you need to know a bit of background on recent computing trends.Gone are the days of companies hosting their own servers in a data centre, with all of the associated costs of maintaining the physical hardware and worrying about backups. Instead it is more economical to have companies like Google, Amazon or Microsoft create giant data centres who then lease computing power to us. These companies don’t purchase individual servers, or even servers by the rack, instead they purchase servers by the shipping container! When a company purchases one of these shipping containers, all they see from the outside are 3 holes: one for power, network and water cooling. This allows them to rapidly add extra computing power and expand data centres with a minimum of fuss. Due to the massive economies of scale that these data centres get, you are now able to go to companies like Amazon and GoGriddotcom to rent entire virtual computers for around 10 cents an hour. The possibilities opened up by being able to very quickly and cheaply get processing power are immense. A simple example being an e-commerce website, here a company would usually have to purchase multiple servers to host their website to handle peak load, but will have 80% of their servers sitting there idling. Instead of having to outlay a lot of initial capital on these servers, the same company can instead rent a single server from one of these websites, and scale it up as demand increases (like the holiday season). This way they are only paying for server time they actually need.

However with this cheap raw computing power comes complexity. Now developers need to manually turn these virtual servers on, set up load balances, install applications and maintain security patches, while also updating their code and websites across multiple servers.

Thats nice, If I am not wrong I already read this but don't know where.