Azure? Isn’t that a colour?
‘Windows Azure’ is Microsoft’s new toy and when it goes live properly, it’s going to be big.
Basically, Azure is Microsoft’s answer to the Cloud computing, where companies like Amazon currently have the market share with their products.
Cloud computing is similar to regular web-hosting packages, but offers scalability in remarkable ways. Here’s what I mean.
If you have a website for your business selling ‘Widgets’ (whatever they may be) and you’re about to put an advert in a national or international newspaper, telling everybody about your new fangled Widget Mk II, then the thought may (or should) cross your mind about whether your current web-server that you’re using can handle vast amounts of traffic from lots of people around the world trying to buy a Widget or two from you.
I’m not talking about hundreds of people all connecting in at the same second of the same hour, on the same day; more like thousands or hundreds of thousands in that same timeframe.
Typically, web-servers slow down, as they’re trying to cater for each and every user-request in turn. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are very much this approach – hit the website as many times as possible in an attempt to make the website’s server crash and fail, causing a potential loss of revenue.
There was a big thing a while ago whereby bookmakers were being extorted for large sums of money, or risked a massive DDoS attack during big race days.
One solution to this, is to contact the people that host your website and take out an additional contract for another server, and get the two servers linked and share the workload. Good idea. Expensive and time-consuming, but certainly valid. But then, just one more server? What if you had needed another but wanted to keep costs down and lived to regret it later? Or maybe you actually needed an additional 10 servers? But then, what if your advert flops and no-one wants to visit your site to buy a widget? You’re then stuck with those however-many servers for the duration of the contract, 12 months maybe?
In steps the wonder of Cloud computing!
What if, just before those adverts get printed, you check the settings on your website and change an innocent-looking ‘1’ to ‘25’ and press save, and magically, there’s 25 servers cooking away at serving your website? And, even better, what if you only paid for what you use?
And then, once your advert has faded away in yesterday’s news, you then want to scale-back your 25 webservers to just 1 again. Simply change that setting back and press save. Job done and no contracts to worry about.
This is exactly the scenario that Windows Azure is going to help with; scalability.
In addition to this, Microsoft are currently spending lots of money building their own Content Delivery Network (CDN), which are data centres around the world to host the same data - if you’re in the States and you visit the Widget site, then you’ll get content delivered to you from the data centre there; if you’re in Europe, the website will be delivered you as a visitor from the European data centre, meaning that you don’t have to wait for the data to cross the Atlantic Ocean, so it should be a quicker response for visitors coming to your site.
Once a website is deployed to Azure, the person visiting the site won’t know the difference, as it just looks like a website at the end of the day. But as long as that website appears during the busiest time of year for the Widget site and the customer is able to spend their money, then the job is done.
As a developer myself, this stuff should be fantastic. I’ve been playing around with small applications myself with a test-account on Azure and it’s really easy to use, once you get to grips on what’s going on. Also, as all of Microsoft developer toys, such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), ASP .Net and ASP .Net MVC and so on, are all being baked into the big cake, everything should just ‘work’ and work efficiently too.
Hopefully, that should explain a little as to what Azure is, and why it’s important. I’ll post more articles on here later.
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