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Is Your Head in the Clouds? A View of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform

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Ask anyone in the know about technology trends and they’ll say that, overwhelmingly, the current push in the technology sector is to move organizations into the Cloud. Like most buzzwords, the Cloud can mean a lot of different things to different people.

The original definition of the Cloud applied to any IT service that was not hosted in a company’s own data center. Software as a Service (SaaS) took over that space with online services like SalesForce. Pricing in SaaS is generally user-based and possibly transaction-based, which can be fairly expensive, especially if you have a large base of casual users.

Along with SaaS came Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which traditionally means Virtual Machines (VMs) are hosted in someone else’s data center. Fees for the VMs are generally flat because they are based on the resources that the VM has been assigned. Because VMs have fixed resources already assigned, any request to increase the resources has to be carefully analyzed and tested to confirm that the increase doesn’t impact other services and won’t be detrimental to the overall health of the system.

Today, however, the Cloud definition has expanded to include Platform as a Service (PaaS), the next generation of SaaS and IaaS. Companies such as Google and Microsoft are jumping on the bandwagon and are rolling out PaaS software.

PaaS has evolved into a one-stop-shop for all of a company’s IT needs. One big key to saving money in IT is density. The more things you pack into the same environment, the more cost-effective your solution. PaaS allows more applications and services to be packed into the same environment, which in turn saves money.

In this article we’ll cover Microsoft’s PaaS Azure Cloud platform, highlighting some of its key features and showing how these features can make your company more efficient while reducing overhead and IT costs. We’ll touch on Azure’s three biggest services—Web Hosting, Cloud Services, and SQL Server—and showcase a recent RJS Professional Services project where we migrated a customer’s database and business applications to Azure’s cloud.

Web Hosting

The Azure platform allows the management of an almost infinite number of .NET, PHP, Python, or Node.js websites all from a single Web portal. The list of available frameworks seems to be growing by the day, too: Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, and Apache Tomcat, just to name a few.

For a real-world example, while writing this paragraph a brand new WordPress site was just deployed to RJS’ Azure instance (note: the RJS blog is hosted via WordPress). You can view that site here: http://blogtest1.azurewebsites.net. Don’t worry about the domain; domains can be easily transferred to Azure sites. The Azure management portal allows for simple management and set up, like in this example, for all of your applications.

The first version of Azure’s Web portal works pretty well, but Microsoft is currently beta testing a new version, which when ready, should offer an even more user-friendly experience. Since all of these services are hosted on the Cloud, you don’t need staff trained to manage them. The RJS Professional Services team can assist you with these services from our office, including setting up your own Azure Portal and migrating your sites.

Cloud Services

Unlike the traditional model of creating a physical server and installing IIS, or creating a VM and installing IIS, users can now create service applications that can run in a virtualized IIS environment. Under the covers, it’s still VMs and IIS, but by being separated and above that layer, you gain some key features, the first of which is automatic scaling. If your cloud service gets busy, Azure can be configured to automatically spin-up another instance and load balance your service. No input is required from you or your staff. Best of all, you are only charged for the second instance while it is running, so as the load decreases, Azure will decide to turn that second instance off and your billing will return to the single instance you had before.

.NET services that are deployed in this fashion do need some modifications, but with each Visual Studio update, these modifications are getting easier to handle. This is by far one of the most valuable features in Azure. Deployments are all automatic from Visual Studio and can be done to test or production sites in less than 15 minutes. When developing custom applications and services, it is important to save time and have repeatable processes to ensure smooth deployments. The RJS Professional Services team does just that for our custom projects.

SQL Server

If you are using Azure, you will never need to install SQL Server on your machine again. You can create a new database in Azure in minutes. Databases in Azure have the same benefits of auto-scaling mentioned above for cloud services. Databases can also be set up to automatically backup to a location of your choice. Meanwhile, Microsoft is redundantly backing-up your systems and data. You will never have to worry about failed hard drives or power outages.

Migrating to this environment from an on-premises solution is not as hard as it sounds, and the IT staff cost savings can be pretty substantial. While there can be outages, they are minimal and setting-up redundant instances across Microsoft’s different regional data centers can eliminate this issue.

RJS Customer Success with Azure

Developers can fawn all day over the many features of Microsoft Azure. RJS Professional Services got to dive deep into these handy features while recently assisting a customer with the Microsoft Azure platform.

The customer was saddled with rising IT costs. Because the company is a large construction firm that is spread across the western United States, configuring Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), servers, VMs, and SharePoint became a real pain-point. Users needed access to company systems, whether they were at the coffee shop, their home office, or on a job site.

After assessing their needs and challenges, we migrated their on-premises database to Azure. We also migrated their custom business application, which is written in .NET, to run inside of Azure Cloud Services.

Next, we created new Web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) so other systems can send data to the Cloud. We even integrated authentication using Azure Active Directory, giving users the single sign-on they had grown accustom to with their previous on-premises solution.

Now, with the entire solution in the Cloud, we’re working towards deeper SharePoint integration. Considering RJS Professional Services no longer needs to use VPN, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to update the old site in IIS, updating the custom application is a breeze. This significantly reduces the overall IT cost for maintaining these systems.

Contact Us

The RJS Professional Services team has the expertise to assist your company with these kinds of projects. Feel free to reach out to us any time at +1 952-933-0609 or sales@rjssoftware.com with questions, feedback, or to request a more in-depth article in the future.


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