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Why Use the Cloud?

The main benefit of moving to the cloud is the savings in time and infrastructure for application deployment.
You can focus on your application development and not the infrastructure.

The backend is fully automated and handles the patching, updating, and maintenance of the operating system and applications. Windows Azure follows a pay-per-use model, where you only pay for the resources that your application uses; there is no upfront cost.

One major concern in application deployment is the ability to survive hardware and system failures, and Windows Azure is designed with high availability in mind. Applications are replicated across multiple servers in different locations for fail-safe recovery. Microsoft delivers a 99.95% monthly SLA (Service-Level Agreement).

As is often the goal, your application may at times require scaling up as demands grow. Windows Azure is designed for elastic scale, therefore, multiple instances can be spun up as needed. Alternatively, the customer can drop the number of instances to zero when there is no demand. Since Windows Azure follows the pay-per-use model, you only pay for the number of instances that you use and the storage you consume.

Another important benefit is that SQL Database (formerly SQL Azure), which is the storage component of Windows Azure, shares the same basic programming models with Microsoft SQL Server, thus if you are familiar with SQL Server product code base, your skills can be applied to working with SQL Database.

While a relatively new business for Microsoft, the growth of Windows Azure is a testament to the growing importance of cloud computing as well as Microsoft’s platform.

 Cloud Computing Services

Cloud computing refers to the notion of placing computing services in a central data center, accessible by the Internet.
The main types of cloud computing services are
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS),
Platform as a Service (PaaS), and
Software as a Service (SaaS)

• IaaS provides the hardware necessary for deploying an application, however the onus is on the developer (customer) to patch, upgrade, and maintain the operating system.
• With PaaS, in addition to the hardware, the operating system and runtime environment necessary for deploying an application is also provided
• SaaS provides the entire end-to-end software application to the customer. The customer is only required to sign up for a given service, and the SaaS handles the entire application.

We should note that there are in fact other types of cloud services such as Security as a Service or IT as a Service offered by other cloud computing platforms.
The types of services available with Windows Azure are

1. virtual machines (VMs) (IaaS),
2. cloud application services (PaaS), and
3. websites (SaaS)