Microsoft Azure And The Competitive Cloud Industry - Collab365

Editor's Notes

1. The cloud powers modern enterprise experiences. In many cases the technology in an enterprise can be a differentiator or competitive advantage. There is no lock in like cloud lock in.
2. Where would you run most existing websites? Where would you run most packaged applications or custom applications? Where would you run most relational databases? Where would you do development and test scaling (that fits how you dev now?). Where would you do lower hanging solutions like storage scaling or DR rapid deployment?
3. Storage options for Azure and AWS users are varied. Both AWS and Azure offerings are roughly equivalent to each other. Azure users have choices of Block blob, File, Page blob and disk, and table and queue storage types. And for data redundancy, you have locally redundant storage (LRS), geo-redundant storage (GRS), Read Access GRS (RA-GRS), or Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) from which to choose. The data redundancy type options are based upon which storage type you select. You can also select your storage geographic region from a dropdown list, but be aware that some regions and redundancy types are more expensive than others. AWS customers have several storage options and multiple choices to make. Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is a very popular choice for storing and retrieving data from anywhere on the web and is the basis for many third party commercial cloud storage services such as Dropbox. AWS also offers CloudFront to distribute your static and dynamic web content. AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) is block storage that’s appropriate for database workloads. You can also encrypt this block-level storage as an added feature. Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is in preview, but it is a file storage for EC2 virtual machines (VMs) that allows you to create, mount to your EC2 instances, and then read and write data from your VMs and to and from your filesystem.
4. What’s the same All of the services offer a means to connect private networks to cloud networks over a leased line rather than using the Internet. That’s pretty much where the similarity ends. What’s different – AWS Direct Connect is a 802.1q VLAN (layer 2) based service[3]. There’s an hourly charge for the port (that varies by the port speed), and also per GB egress charges that vary by location (ingress is free, just like on the Internet). What’s different – Azure ExpressRoute is a BGP (layer 3) based service, and it too charges by port speed, but the price is monthly (although it’s prorated hourly), and there are no further ingress/egress charges. An interesting recent addition to the portfolio is ExpressRoute Premium, which enables a single connection to fan out across Microsoft’s private network into many regions rather than having to have point-to-point connections into each region being used. What’s different – Google Direct Peering is a BGP (layer 3) based service. The connection itself is free, with no port or per hour charges. Egress is charged for per GB, and varies by region. Summary table Cloud Type Port Egress Amazon VLAN $ $ Microsoft BGP $ Google BGP $
5. Available globally starting Dec. 1, Azure Compute Pre-Purchase Plan allows customers to pay for their Azure compute capacity for an entire one year at a discount of up to 63 percent. This makes sense for customers with steady state, predictable workloads on Azure.