Take note of the latest cloud computing solution.
Microsoft recently announced its entry into the cloud computing and hosted services world: the Windows Azure platform, which offers a variety of service capabilities housed within Microsoft’s datacenters. Businesses can use the platform to build and deploy new applications and databases or integrate data with their internal systems and/or partners.
The Windows Azure platform provides some unique features that differentiate it from other cloud computing platforms. Most notably, Microsoft designed and built Windows Azure from the ground-up to be a cloud computing platform—a comprehensive platform for data storage, hosting, computation, and service bus capabilities that enable customers to quickly build applications and instantly grow and scale their environment to meet demands, with clear and predictable service level agreements (SLA) that ensure systems are up and running when needed.
The benefits of Windows Azure.
The capabilities and design of the Windows Azure platform combine to provide users with a number of benefits:
Get up and running quickly. Traditionally, getting an application up and running on the web meant procuring and installing servers, configuring the network, registering addresses, and performing many other tasks that could take weeks or even months. With the Azure platform, these “basics” are set up and ready to go at any time. This means you can get an application deployed to the cloud in a matter of days rather than weeks.
Scale dynamically to meet your demands. The platform allows you to quickly and easily add more processing power by assigning instances to your application to meet the speed and usage demands of your users. It also allows you to dial your usage up or down, as needed, to meet peak demand.
Reduce IT complexity and increase reliability. By using a cloud computing environment, users get the benefit of a large, scalable, and stable environment, without having to host servers, storage, backup, or monitoring tools to support the application. This helps reduce the burden on your IT team and allows you to focus on creating useful applications to drive your business. The Azure platform has automated tools to monitor your application to ensure that it is up and running all the time, so you never have to worry about applying updates, patches, or service packs to your servers. In addition, with Azure, you don’t have to pay for additional software licensing for tools like SQL server or Windows Server.
Key uses for the Windows Azure platform.
The Azure platform has many potential applications—from deploying small tactical applications to enabling whole suite of tools for your IT environment. It is particularly well suited for hosting:
- Applications that see only periodic or seasonal use, enabling organizations to avoid having servers sitting idle for a period of time.
- Corporate websites that may have spikes in traffic.
- SQL server data using Microsoft SQL Azure, eliminating the need to build or maintain large SQL database servers within your environment.
In addition, you can leverage the platform to make Web services available to business partners—easing their ability to do business with you without providing them access to internal systems.
Windows Azure in action: The 2009 Taste of Chicago interactive map.
In May 2009, the City of Chicago asked West Monroe Partners to develop an interactive website for its largest event, the Taste of Chicago. The City wanted the map to be ready for public use in less than two weeks; one month before the July event.
Because it would receive a significant number of hits in a short period of time and because the City didn’t have sufficient time to coordinate a hosted environment to support an unknown amount of traffic, this application was an ideal candidate for hosting via a cloud application. To meet these demands, West Monroe Partners chose to implement the map and host it on the Windows Azure platform, utilizing the Windows Azure Hosting Services and Data Services.
The Azure platform provided several benefits in building the application. It was quick to market and required just a small development team. And, because it was run across 25 Azure instances, it provided reliability and scalability and minimized concerns about backups, redundancy and site uptime.
West Monroe Partners works with clients to evaluate and design cloud computing solutions utilizing the Windows Azure platform and other available platforms. For more information, please contact Evan Callender.