Practical No: 9

Aim: Case Study on Microsoft Azure

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm that provides a promise to revolutionize the way
the software development industry operates. Microsoft Azure is one of the leading cloud
service providers and a strong competitor of Amazon Web Services. Microsoft Azure has
plenty of features that make it one of the crowd’s favourites. Microsoft Azure, formerly
known as Windows Azure, is Microsoft's public cloud computing platform. It provides a
broad range of cloud services, including compute, analytics, storage and networking. Users
can pick and choose from these services to develop and scale new applications or run existing
applications in the public cloud.
Working of Microsoft Azure
Once customers subscribe to Azure, they have access to all the services included in the Azure
portal. Subscribers can use these services to create cloud-based resources, such as VMs and
databases. Azure resources and services can then be assembled into running environments
used to host workloads and store data. In addition to the services that Microsoft offers
through the Azure portal, a number of third-party vendors also make software directly
available through Azure. The cost billed for third-party applications varies widely but
may involve paying a subscription fee for the application, plus a usage fee for the
infrastructure used to host the application.
Microsoft provides the following five different customer support options for Azure:
•Basic
•Developer
•Standard
•Professional Direct
•Enterprise (Premier).
Benefits of Microsoft Azure
1.Scalability on Demand:
Microsoft Azure is able to easily adapt to the ever-changing circumstances of your business.
Its flexible features can work both on a manual and auto scaling basis, in line with the
demands of application usage. Unlike traditional hosting, scaling in Azure is much easier
because you can change to different service plans depending on your needs.7You get a
competitive advantage right from the get-go, as you still benefit from the same application
performance regardless of the user influx and without having to worry about underutilised
on-premise solutions.
2. Cost-efficiency: Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go model enables businesses to only spend for
what they use. Essentially, Azure allows you to access more resources as and when you need
them, loading them as a cluster. This means that when you experience the sought-after
periods of high volume transactions, you won’t need to spend money on additional hardware
and IT maintenance. With Microsoft Azure, you can get a server configured to your exact
specifications in less than 20 minutes, so you will always have plenty of server capacity.
3. Data Backup and Disaster Recovery
With over 50 world-class compliance certifications and 99 years of retention, Azure
can protect your data like no other cloud computing platform. It offers single click
backup support for SQL database and virtual machines running in Azure.
In the event of service disruption or data loss, Microsoft Azure can recover your data
66% quicker than an on-premise IT solution.
4. Bespoke Industry Applications
High-risk industries like healthcare, financial services and government often require a
specific set of applications with unique compliance and security features. With Microsoft
Azure, you can address individual challenges from implementing remote access and
modernising your financial systems, to optimising customer relationships and enhancing
engagement.
5. Improved IT Infrastructure
Through IaaS and PaaS, enterprises can outsource their IT infrastructure and create web
applications without having to spend money on infrastructure maintenance. You can partner
with a Microsoft Cloud service provider to leverage IaaS and PaaS and build custom
enterprise apps on Azure to scale up your business faster.7Ideally, you should always use a
reputable Microsoft partner with the exclusive Gold accolade for priority access to
Microsoft’s own IT support team.
6. Secure Identity & Access Management (IAM)
You can considerably reduce hacking risks with Azure Active Directory and its IAM
capabilities. Identity and Access Management solutions protect your resources and
applications with additional features including Multi-Factor Authentication, Application
Proxy and Conditional Access policies.7IAM also removes the downtime for your IT staff to
set up accounts and passwords in SaaS applications - users can simply login and access data
or apps using just their organisational credentials.
Azure products and services
Mobile. These products help developers build cloud applications for mobile devices,
providing notification services, support for back-end tasks, tools for building application
program interfaces (APIs) and the ability to couple geospatial context with data.
Web. These services support the development and deployment of web applications. They also
offer features for search, content delivery, API management, notification and reporting.
Media and content delivery network (CDN). These CDN services include on-demand
streaming, digital rights protection, encoding, and media playback and indexing.Integration.
These are services for server backup, site recovery and connecting private and public clouds.
Practical No: 10
Aim: Case Study on Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalable computing
capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Using Amazon EC2 eliminates
your need to invest in hardware up front, so you can develop and deploy applications faster.
You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need,
configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 enables you to scale
up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, reducing your need to
forecast traffic.
Amazon EC2 is a central part of AWS:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) forms a central part of Amazon. com's cloud-
computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS) by allowing users to rent virtual
computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable
deployment of applications by providing a web service through which a user can
boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls
an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate
server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers – hence the term
"elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that
allows for latency optimization andhigh levels of redundancy.
In November 2010, Amazon switched its own retail website to use EC2 and AWS.
Features of EC2:
Amazon EC2 provides the following features:
• Virtual computing environments, known as instances
• Preconfigured templates for your instances, known as Amazon Machine Images
(AMIs), that package the bits you need for your server (including the operating
system and additional software)
• Various configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity for
your instances, known as instance types
• Secure login information for your instances using key pairs (AWS stores the public
key, and you store the private key in a secure place)
• Storage volumes for temporary data that's deleted when you stop or
terminate your instance, known as instance store volumes
• Persistent storage volumes for your data using Amazon Elastic Block Store
(Amazon EBS), known as Amazon EBS volumes
• Multiple physical locations for your resources, such as instances and Amazon
EBS volumes, known as Regions and Availability Zones
• A firewall that enables you to specify the protocols, ports, and source IP ranges that
can reach your instances using security groups
• Static IPv4 addresses for dynamic cloud computing, known as Elastic IP addresses