Our view on Windows Azure vs the Competition

Windows Azure - Power from the Cloud

Azure - The First Thoroughbred Cloud Computing Solution?

Microsoft will be the first to admit that they were slow off the mark with their adoption of web technologies. After years of playing catch-up, in the last 2 years Microsoft have recovered their position at the leading edge, with Windows Azure.

There are several major players in the Cloud Computing web space. These include Amazon, Google and, of course, Microsoft. The differences between what these providers offer is substantial.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon's offering is a tool for flexible server handling and management. That is to say you can pay for the power you need and fire up whatever servers you need at whatever times on an ad-hoc basis. You can also host up services and storage on demand. Presuming you've got "virtual servers" ready (basically all the software for a server that runs on a server simulator, rather than an actual server) then this can provide huge amounts of power, on demand.

The ability to use power as and when you need it is undoubtedly a key facet of any full cloud computing solution. But the problem is that you are still simply running Windows, Linux or Unix servers. Running these servers is incredibly flexible, but still the same software as you would use anywhere else. That makes for easy porting of current software into the cloud, but it also carries with it the maintenance and licensing implications arising from having many servers on specific software.

Google's App Engine

Google's App Engine is a powerful platform allowing you to run Java or Python code on the same fundamental infrastructure as Google's own applications run. They have developed slick interfaces for administrating and deploying cloud services and provided for large storage requirements.

App Engine is potentially the most powerful of all the cloud solutions, in terms of the raw power it can provide for your site. It is not, however, designed to perform all the functions a website might. You can't write to files (maybe you want to click a button that writes a PDF to a file that is then available for download on the site) or open network connections to other systems directly. This doesn't stop it being a powerful solution, but it does prohibit some activities that, at some point in your application's life cycle, might just prove to be important.

Windows Azure

Windows Azure, under the bonnet, is still running a copy of Windows 2008, but as a developer you don't see this. Instead of controlling the servers you use, or simply deploying the application, Azure gives you an ideal middle ground. You code applications to run as independent processes, and you can control how many of them are running. You don't need to worry about what machines they are on or whether they can talk to the right databases or filesystems, you simply design your code so Azure can manage it.

The clever folks at Microsoft have developed the Azure Fabric - an application layer that is a caretaker of all the applications running on it. It works to handle everything from updates to error management and resetting of applications if needed. It can drop out entire racks of servers if they are faulty and ensure no loss of services for the applications running on Azure. Meanwhile the version of Windows underpinning all this has been tailored to the specific hardware that the software is running on. Making it fast.

As developers we simply have to work with code much as we always have done, however now we need to bare in mind that we have new super-fast storage techniques and we have to write our code to best make use of the way Azure works with our applications.

Summary

It is our firm belief that Azure is the winner. It's easy for a Microsoft Development Company to say that, of course. Azure seems to us to provide a thoroughbred cloud solution, revolutionising the way our code is run to provide almost limitless flexibility, while maintaining very low overheads and allowing us to use most of the traditional development techniques that we have grown accustomed to.

If your interested in a cloud based solution to a business requirement, why not get in touch to discuss it further?

Cloud Computing - next generation computing or another iFad?

Cloud Computing - passing technical buzz phrase or real shift in IT services?

The short answer to the question above is that it is a real shift in IT services. The use of cloud computing means you can achieve every business owners favourite goal: more, for less. At Arkios we don't believe in drowning you with information to make a point, so what follows is the long answer, without too many more buzz phrases or overly complex descriptions.

When I'm explaining why Cloud Computing is so important I find the following 'story' to be a useful way to explain it:

Let's say you are a company called Cloud Development Services. You are a reasonably large organisation with around 100 managers, each one of whom expects a number of reports for a Wednesday afternoon meeting, aggregating data from many departments and geographic locations around the world.

Each week at Cloud Development Services you need to aggregate the latest data up to around midday on Wednesday and produce a host of customised reports, and you need them by 2pm. This requires significant computing power to collect, collate and process the data rich reports reliably by 2pm. You work with your infrastructure team and establish you'll need 4 servers to meet this demand. These might cost around £2000 each and around £2000 / year budget for maintenance.

Now shift this requirement to the Cloud paradigm. You need 4 servers worth of computing power, but you need this once a week. What you are actually asking for is 8 "server hours". Or even better, simply "enough power to get the job done on time, however much power that is". You don't want to worry about the availability of those servers, powering them, or maintaining them, you just want that power to be available on demand.

So you instruct your report developers to code the reports to run on Windows Azure. At 12pm on the Wednesday it fires up initially just one or two processes that get the data from your various databases around the world. Once the data is ready it fires up many powerful instances of your reporting software, each with its reports to run and answers all the report requirements. Once it's finished you power the processes back down and you're no long paying anything. Not only will this processor time likely cost you less than 20% of your outlay for the servers, but it will be faster and more reliable, without any of the associated maintenance costs.

This story is a simple example, but the same principle can work for many different scenarios. You end up spending less, having more power available and consuming less electricity and manpower. Very literally getting you more, for less.

So is Cloud Computing a fad?

It is safe to say that cloud computing isn't a fad. The concept has been in use since before the cloud computing term was established and has been making some IT solutions affordable for years. The term "cloud computing" is a powerful buzz phrase. However in time it will, like so many other buzz phrases of the past, simply be part of what is known as Information Technology.