An Azure Overview and Perspective

  • Article

I'm producing a series of blog post that highlights the work I've done with an O'Reilly media video course. I will produce several posts a week to support this course, as seen below.

https://bit.ly/bruno-does-linux-data-java

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The course is targeted towards developers who want to write Java applications on Linux and host those application in Azure.

These applications talk to today's top data stores, including:

  • Azure Tables
  • Azure Blobs
  • Azure Queues
  • SQL Server
  • SQL Database
  • MySQL
  • PostGres
  • DocumentDB
  • MongoDB
  • Cassandra
  • Redis

High Level Overview

  • Here is the Azure big picture type of slides. Don't worry, I'm going to get to real low-level coding details as these posts progress.

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Slide 1 of 7 - Azure is Microsoft's public cloud

The magnitude of the platform

  • I don't expect you to read the fine print here
  • Although you can see the three pillars here
    • virtual machines
    • cloud services
    • application services
  • The bottom half of the image shows a tremendous depth of services and capabilities

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Slide 2 of 7 - A broad and powerful cloud platform

Azure has more data centers than Google and AWS combined

  • This is important for compliance reasons
  • Different countries have different laws
  • Having a data center in different countries allows Microsoft to conform to those country's laws
  • Some of the VM's are extremely powerful
    • 32 cores with half a terabyte of ram combine with SSD storage

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Slide 3 of 7 - A massive global footprint

You can think of Azure as having three core pillars

  • Compute, storage, networking is the starting point for any cloud platform
  • Ultimately, platform as a service will rule the world, as I've commented in previous posts
  • Many view platform as a service as vendor lock-in, not to mention developers like being able to control individual virtual machines
  • But managing a large distributed computing platform is difficult and error prone

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Slide 4 of 7 - A range of capabilities

Many companies choose to build their own platform as a service using core infrastructure

  • This gives them the ability to avoid vendor lock-in because they are abstracting away the provisioning, scaling, health monitoring, networking, orchestration, scheduling and more
  • The O'Reilly course that I have created speaks to the storage capabilities of Azure
    • The link for this course is a top of this post and dives deep into Java, Linux using 11 different storage mechanisms, including relational and NoSQL

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Slide 5 of 7 - Avoiding the vendor lock-in

Cloud services allow you to focus on your application and the data, not the underlying infrastructure

  • The value proposition of cloud services is that you abstract away the details of running individual virtual machines
  • instead, you can think of your compute needs as being a collection of resources is managed by a cloud-based operating system

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Slide 6 of 7 - Focusing on your application, not infrastructure

Application services are optimized to support web and mobile workloads

  • Many of integration points between software as a service applications are built in
  • The obvious goal here is to free developers from the low-level details of supporting mobile and web applications

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Slide 7 of 7 - Easily support mobile and web apps