MICROSOFT AZURE CLOUD CAPABILITIES, COSTS, AND UPDATES

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1 E-Guide MICROSOFT AZURE CLOUD CAPABILITIES, COSTS, AND UPDATES SearchCloud Computing

2 A s offerings continue to evolve, it becomes imperative to continually assess how various vendors stack up. In this e- guide, explore recent updates to Microsoft Azure, as well as the current capabilities and pricing structure. PAGE 2 OF 13

3 TOP MICROSOFT AZURE CLOUD UPDATES OF Trevor Jones Amazon Web Services remained the dominant force in by a wide margin and showed no signs of slowing down. But was the year that Microsoft s public rose above the rest of the pack and became the clear runner-up in the market. Microsoft added a host of new features to Azure, including a heavy focus on big data and containers, and used its enterprise experience to be the most likely alternative to Amazon for large corporations shedding their own data centers. Here are some of the most important updates to Azure in. AZURE DATA LAKE, IOT SUITE AND BIG DATA IN MICROSOFT AZURE CLOUD Microsoft went big on big data in, with a series of new features and improvements to existing services for processing massive data sets in the. Azure Data Lake was rolled out in April. The Hadoop File System is built to handle high volumes at low latency, with no limits on how much data can be stored in a single account. That service, as well as Azure Stream Analytics, PAGE 3 OF 13

4 represent some of the best improvements from Microsoft in, said Dave Bartoletti, principal analyst at Forrester Research. They re great updates to deal with huge data sets, and an analytics service that s easy to use by nondata scientists to get started quickly -- and cheaply -- with big data analytics, Bartoletti said. Other related services added to the Microsoft Azure include the Internet of Things (IoT) Suite, SQL Data Warehouse, and the massive G-series VMs for compute and storage. The continued upgrades around big data have a lot of potential for predictive modeling and correcting problems, said Mark Clawson, services team lead at emazzanti Technologies, a Microsoft partner and IT consultancy. It s almost like a full-time job keeping up with all the new stuff Azure is rolling out, Clawson said. There s just a plethora of tools and constant additions to the stack. Less a singular new powerful tool than a packaging of services, IoT Suite provided preconfigured, end-to-end services for collecting and analyzing data. It expanded on Azure Intelligent Systems and included Azure Stream Analytics, so customers can scale quickly, monitor workflow for efficiencies and integrate existing workloads. PAGE 4 OF 13

5 EASE OF USE IoT Suite wasn t the only streamlining to the Microsoft Azure this year. In fact, automation and improved user experience was a big theme for Azure throughout. They ve done a fantastic job with the new Azure portal, Clawson said. The user interface is great, and some of the tools that have come along with that really makes our lives simpler and helps us provide a larger set of tools we can expose to the businesses to solve their problems. Azure App Service was one of the best examples of the streamlining efforts, in which Microsoft took a set of existing services and brought them together under one suite. It went a step further with PowerApps, which added an easyto-use interface optimized for building business applications, said Jillian Freeman, senior analyst at Technology Business Research. This opens Azure to a whole new set of users, Freeman said. While many vendors, including Salesforce, ServiceNow and IBM, have been marketing around the citizen developer, Azure App Service may have cracked the code. PAGE 5 OF 13

6 PARTNERSHIPS WITH OLD FRIENDS Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Dell have each walked away from the public, but that doesn t mean the massive tech vendors don t have a role to play in the market. Microsoft once again turned to its old hardware partners to extend the reach of its software products. Dell and HPE both rolled out managed hybrid services for connecting private s to Azure. AZURE STACK Azure Stack is a private service for those still wary of the public that combines software-defined infrastructure, as well as Azure portal, Azure Resource Manager, and Azure-based IaaS and PaaS services. It takes away perceived security risks by keeping workloads behind the firewall while adding the same functionality around infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and management that can be found in Microsoft s public counterpart. Once a customer is ready to move to a hosted environment, Microsoft is hoping to get around competition with AWS, Freeman said. PAGE 6 OF 13

7 EXPANDED REACH The public market is certainly global, but in many cases, it s the local touch that counts. Due in large part to data sovereignty laws and proximity to data, mega vendors have plunked down data centers across the globe, as they race to reach the widest possible audience. Microsoft was certainly no different, with new data centers in the U.K., India, Germany and the Netherlands. Azure currently operates out of 20 regions in nine different countries. AZURE CONTAINER SERVICE Like several of its competitors before it, Microsoft in September said it will offer its own container service to orchestrate and manage fleets of containers on its public. Azure Container Service is built on Docker, Apache Mesos and the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System. Microsoft certainly wasn t the first to offer this feature, and it doesn t necessarily stand out from the pack at this point, but it s an important step in what has become a crowded competition over managing containers. PAGE 7 OF 13

8 AZURE WELCOMES RED HAT, OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY Open source software plays a big role in the, and the once-notoriously closed Microsoft hasn t shied away from embracing it under CEO Satya Nadella. From Docker to Hadoop, Azure continued to embrace open source in, and there was possibly no bigger punctuation to this shift than the partnership with Red Hat. Though not the first Linux distribution available on Azure, Red Hat was conspicuously missing from what could be deployed on the public. That changed in November when Microsoft said it would soon allow customers to run Red Hat Linux Enterprise applications and other Red Hat tools directly on Azure. Microsoft is a different company in the past year and a half, said Robert Mahowald, program vice president at IDC. PAGE 8 OF 13

9 EXPLORING CAPABILITIES, COSTS OF MICROSOFT AZURE CLOUD Valerie Silverthorne Despite facing tough competition from rivals like Google and Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure has become a major player in the enterprise public market. But before making Azure the designated platform for your organization, it s important to review its unique services, pricing structure and customer support model. The Microsoft Azure combines infrastructure as a service and platform as a service, which allows organizations to choose between public, private or hybrid s environments. Organizations can also opt to have Microsoft fully manage those environments for them. Azure was designed for enterprises looking to connect existing data centers to public or private s. The platform supports popular operating systems, tools, languages and frameworks, including Windows, Linux, SQL Server, C# and Java. PAGE 9 OF 13

10 According to Microsoft, Azure has 99.95% availability, and the company offers service level agreements to that effect. Azure is deployed through data centers around the world in 19 regions, including mainland China. Here s an overview of Azure s key services to determine if it s the right platform for your organization: Compute: Azure gives customers the ability to provision Windows and Linux VMs, run large-scale batch jobs, create scalable applications and deploy Windows client apps. Web and mobile: Users can deploy and scale websites in seconds on Azure, according to Microsoft, and developers can build and host mobile app back ends on the platform. Enterprises can securely share APIs with developers, partners and employees. Data and storage: Azure offers a managed SQL database as a service, as well as a NoSQL document DBaaS called DocumentDB. Azure s StorSimple service is hybrid storage for enterprise customers. Analytics: Using Azure HDInsight, customers can provision managed Hadoop clusters on Azure and tap into real-time stream analytics. Networking: Using Azure, customers can provision private networks PAGE 10 OF 13

11 and connect to on-premises data centers. Azure Traffic Manager balances incoming traffic loads. MICROSOFT AZURE PRICING AND SUPPORT Azure is available for free as a one-month trial, and customers get an additional $200 to spend on Azure services. After deploying Azure, customers pay per minute, and only for services they ve used. There are no upfront costs or termination fees. The is available in a pay-as-you-go model through Microsoft resellers, or through a special enterprise agreement involving upfront guarantees for usage and discounted prices. Azure prices vary depending on the type of service. Microsoft offers website and application hosting in four different tiers: Free tier: Free of charge for up to 10 sites or apps; Standard tier: An unlimited number of sites or apps for $0.10 per hour; VM pricing ranges from $0.018 per hour, or about $13 a month, for the basic tier to $0.171 per hour, or about $127 per month, for optimized computing; and SQL database services range in price from $ per hour, or about $5 per month, for the basic tier to $0.625 per hour, or $465 per month, for the premium tier. PAGE 11 OF 13

12 Microsoft offers 24/7 support and around-the-clock service health monitoring. There are four levels of support: Developer support: $29 per month and offers a service dashboard, Web incident submission, 24/7 break/fix and a response time of less than eight hours; Standard support: $300 a month and offers a response time of less than two hours and three support phone calls per month; Professional Direct support: $1,000 a month and includes a response time of less than an hour, unlimited support phone calls, pooled service delivery management, priority handling, an escalation phone line and limited advisory support; and Premier support: Pricing is not published, but it does include a response time of less than 15 minutes, full advisory support, onsite services and developer mentoring PAGE 12 OF 13

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