{"id":440,"date":"2009-07-15T19:41:21","date_gmt":"2009-07-15T19:41:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/?p=440"},"modified":"2009-07-15T19:46:25","modified_gmt":"2009-07-15T19:46:25","slug":"idle-thoughts-about-azure-and-the-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/07\/15\/idle-thoughts-about-azure-and-the-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"Idle thoughts about Azure and the Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday whilst I was checking my mail I noticed this tweet from Steve Clayton<\/a> at MS:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As I\u2019d had a few conversations about Azure<\/a> earlier in the day it got me thinking.\u00a0 At the time I replied back saying that maybe there\u2019s some confusion out there about where Azure would fit within a company\u2019s overall infrastructure.\u00a0 Hopefully most large companies will be on the ball and understand how cloud services can be used, but smaller organisations that might have less mature IT capabilities may not yet understand where they fit or how best to use them.<\/p>\n

Whilst I was sitting in traffic earlier today I started to think about ways that platforms like Azure or Amazons EC2<\/a> might be useful to me, either personally or at work (can you tell I\u2019m a geek?).\u00a0 To be honest there are loads, but a really basic example might be something like this (it may be stating the obvious!)\u2026<\/p>\n

If other organisations are anything like the ones I\u2019ve worked in they\u2019ll use \u2013 and rely on – dozens of internally developed applications.\u00a0 These might be as trivial as custom room booking tools to more critical ticketing systems or internal shopping carts for services.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Traditionally these web or client-server apps would end up needing their own servers in a rack somewhere, burning power and depreciating nicely.\u00a0 This is ok in the short\/medium term, and you might use some virtualisation to get better utilisation out of the hardware.\u00a0 Even so, the chances are you\u2019ll still be paying for things like software maintenance and you\u2019ll still need to support those systems as well as the app itself.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, as these apps and their servers age, the level of support they need will probably increase but at the same time the willingness of the business to pay for upgrades or updates will probably decrease.\u00a0 After all its worked fine for years why should they pay more now?\u00a0 This is where cloud services can help…<\/p>\n

What if rather than hosting your shiny new application a server that you buy, rack and support yourself, instead you upload your application to (for example) the Azure Services Platform.\u00a0 It supports many of the common platforms like .net, PHP etc. so there shouldn\u2019t be too many changes to the underlying code (I\u2019ll caveat that by saying I\u2019ve not done it myself, so I\u2019m basing this on the conversations I\u2019ve had with MS and those that have).\u00a0 In effect you have the same application running out in the cloud rather than on your own kit.<\/p>\n

There is of course more to consider, basic things like cost through to more in depth subjects like authentication and security.<\/p>\n

In terms of cost parity it largely depends on how utilised the servers are.\u00a0 Cloud services like Azure and EC2 tend to be billed based on usage, i.e. so many cents per hour of CPU time, and so many cents per GB of storage used.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to generalise whether this is cheaper or more expensive than owning your own kit, but you have to remember that those cents per hour of CPU include all the running costs \u2013 hardware, OS, power, cooling, hardware support, software support, ongoing patching, upgrades overtime etc.\u00a0 I can say that where I\u2019ve looked at this sort of thing in the past cost have looked pretty good in comparison.\u00a0 Especially when you consider that the initial setup cost is far lower (no need to buy kit) and you don\u2019t need to worry about old servers going out of support and having to chase your business\/customers for funds to upgrade them in five years time.<\/p>\n

Having an app out in the cloud is all well and good, but how do people sign into it?\u00a0 Is it another username and password for people to remember?\u00a0 In some cases the answer is probably yes, but where I think MS have a huge advantage is their work to improve the authentication experience for apps hosted on Azure \u2013 particularly for business customers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Their federation tool, currently called Geneva<\/a>, that allows you federate Active Directory with Azure (I\u2019ve written about this before here<\/a>).\u00a0 In effect, if you have Geneva setup then accessing an application hosted on Azure would have the same user experience as if it was hosted on your own network and domain.\u00a0 Their usual username and password will authenticate them, and in most cases will sign them in transparently using integrated authentication.<\/p>\n

The security of cloud services is always a question that comes up, and as this weeks news about leaks from Twitter<\/a> have proved is something you have to consider very hard.\u00a0 Whether it\u2019s more or less risky than publishing an application to the internet yourself is up for debate.\u00a0 Nonetheless it\u2019s a question that you\u2019ll probably have to answer when asked.<\/p>\n

Anyway, that\u2019s a pretty basic example, but it\u2019s probably a scenario that\u2019s fairly common.\u00a0 Where private clouds might fit within this is another matter altogether!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How might a companies use Micirosofts Azure Services Platform and other cloud services? A fairly basic example might be…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[102,189,45,302,182,13],"class_list":["post-440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","category-work","tag-active-directory","tag-azure","tag-cloud","tag-ec2","tag-geneva","tag-microsoft","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":441,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions\/441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}