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cloud computing

In High Scalability we cannot lose the opportunity to talk about the cloud, especially because today we cannot talk about scale without talk about cloud computing, that’s why today we are going to talk about Windows Azure.

For those that still don’t know what Windows Azure is, we can say that is a group of services offered by Microsoft that present a solution for different scenarios, this services conform the Windows Azure platform enabling the creation of applications, data base, web services, virtual machines, and different storage type in the cloud bringing with this a lot of advantages, normally this scenarios are:

Applications with predictable peaks:  in case that we have an application with peaks in the number of user accessing for a specific period of time (For example a web site that show lottery results or a portal for annual tax declaration)   Windows Azure is a great option because we can put our application on the cloud and assign resource like memory and processor or more instances when you need it and the reduce the resources when you don’t need it any more, this save a lot a money because you don’t need to invest in hardware that you don’t will use all the time, this way you can get the best result for you investment and at the same time offer to your user a great experience whit the application performance.

Applications with unpredictable peaks: this case as above, we can assign resource dynamically according with our needs avoiding a degradation in the performance of our application and interruption of the services. In this scenario we don’t know when the peak will occur or what will be the magnitude of it.

Fast growing applications: in the last few years we had seen how an application can pass to cero user to thousands or millions of users (Facebook,Instagram,Twitter,etc), if you don’t know how successful your application will become Windows Azure is great idea because you can begin with a small architecture or even an extra small an advance to a large o very large when user begin to come to your web. This way you can scale up or scale out when your need it with only a few clicks and save the initial investment on on-premise servers. Or even if your site suffer a considerably reduction users (like digg or myspace) you can reduces your hardware utilizations from one minute to another saving ,again, maybe thousands or millions of dollars.

ON/OFF applications: in this case we are talking about application that are create for a determinate duration (for example offer streaming video for the FIFA World Cup), again this scenario using Windows Azure allow us to save money deleting the need of acquired new expensive hardware and software to serve services to  thousands of users.

Others advantage of Windows Azure:

  • You don’t need to care about maintaining servers
  • You don’t need to care about configured load balancing
  • You don’t need to care about redundancy
  • You don’t need to care about make backups
  • You don’t need to care about servers licensing
  • You save a lot of money on hardware and energy
  • You can satisfy SLA easily

In a future post we are going to talk about the different services that Windows Azure offer and how we can create an architecture solution based on these services.