Overview: Windows Azure - a properly made cloud hosting of virtual machines
Good afternoon, dear colleagues,
I present to you a translation of an article from our foreign IT colleague about Windows Azure Virtual Machines. Due to the large number of idiomatic and simple verbal delights, in some places the translation is rather loose.
Some of the most important oppositions of Microsoft are not conducted openly, on a disputed field, where public opinion dominates, which is constantly covered by the media. But, if there is something that Microsoft has always done better than its competitors - it is plowing new virgin lands, finding new opportunities and accurate, but reliable processing. Apple and Samsung can, of course, continue to hold their nose along the course, consumer electronics will always be a dead end; Microsoft has much greater potential, being a rising star in the cloud arena. This confrontation began with the desire of Microsoft to transfer e-mail to the Office 365 cloud, then Windows Azure and XaaS are sent to the battle for dominance.
')
If you still think that we have not yet entered the era of “big data”, you are wildly mistaken. Our data needs have already reached astronomical levels, which confirms IBM: 90 percent of the data we have today was created only in the last two years . It is not at all surprising that most of these growing data needs are currently being transferred to a virtual environment, be it a local infrastructure running VMWare or Hyper-V or personally my choice: virtual machines in the cloud.
Before delving into my discussion of Microsoft Azure as a platform on which virtual machines can be placed, let me say that I and a few of my clients have been using this resource on a limited basis since about October of last year. Meanwhile, Microsoft quietly pulled the IaaS component of Windows Azure out of beta, which happened just a few weeks ago. Along with the remarkable roll-out SLA for virtual machines (99.95%), the company also seriously intended to get involved in a price war with the giants of the Amazon market, a war, the outcome of which cannot be predicted. So, if you thought that Microsoft positioned Azure as nothing more than some kind of home projector, you should think again.
Now is the hot time - resources are moving from the physical to the cloud. In my opinion, as a consultant to many small and medium-sized businesses in Chicago, virtual machines located in the cloud are more suitable for small organizations (up to 25 people), and there are reasons for this. Some of these — the most significant benefits of cloud virtual machines over virtual machines in the local infrastructure — are listed below:
• Minimum entry period . If serious local planning and extensive experience are required to deploy local infrastructure on Hyper-V or VMWare, Windows Azure can deploy virtual machines in minutes, abstracting the user from technical preparatory work.
• Low capital costs . Unlike the deployment of Hyper-V, which can result in thousands of dollars spent on hardware resources and licenses, you can simply turn on a virtual machine in Azure and pay $ 60-115 dollars per month.
• Unprecedented resiliency and availability . I have not yet met clients with local infrastructures that would have more than 95% uptime per month. Over time, system performance deteriorates. In this sense, in my experience, Azure has a wonderful uptime.
• Bandwidth . The latest virtual machines I worked with the client had a bandwidth of 110 megabits at 60 megabits. If you have such bandwidth, then consider yourself luckier than most local firms.
• Global remote access. Of course, in traditional infrastructures Remote Desktop is sometimes present, but it must always be configured, and here static IP, and so on, especially if there are several servers. Azure provides a pre-configured FQDN for each virtual machine.
• No concern for license. If the local virtual infrastructure will always have licensing issues (one way or another), the virtual machines in Azure abstract the user from this, including the cost of the license in the cost of the virtual machine itself. Therefore, Azure virtual machines are fully prepared for transfer to Production.
There are other aspects, but my first impressions of Azure were extremely positive. No, there were problems, but if you compare it with Amazon EC2, which I used at the same time, I prefer Azure.
Everything is simple there, prices are very decent compared to competitors, and there is the flexibility that any virtualization project needs. Microsoft even provides the ability to run in the Linux cloud.
Using Azure means that you have access to the fastest communication channels. The Microsoft data center infrastructure is one of the best in the world, and the screenshot above with speed test results for a Server 2012 virtual machine located in Production in Azure speaks for itself.
Amazon and Microsoft are not the only ones who are in the virtual machine arena in the cloud. Some time ago, RackSpace and many small vendors such as SoftSys , PayPerCloud and MyHosting entered the game . I am not writing this in order to somehow belittle these guys, because I have some experience with SoftSys, but they simply cannot compete with Azure in two main aspects: the number of functions provided and the price. In these two aspects, Microsoft and Amazon are leading.
Of course, Google launched the Compute Engine in mid-2012. But, since they only support virtual machines on Linux, and with certain boot issues, I don’t see Google as a serious player. Until. In my opinion, the service needs to add support for virtual machines running Windows in order to compete with Azure and EC2.
I am not one of those who value companies for value alone - I know that there are many more factors that play a role in quality comparison. But today budgets play a role, and when the quality bar is the same, they look at budgets. Therefore, Microsoft must retain Amazon if they want to turn the developing Azure into a service that everyone will use. Also, as Microsoft was beaten by Exchange providers with its Office 365, I think that a virtual infrastructure services arena was created, with just two players - Amazon and Microsoft.
This helps Microsoft keep the bar on pricing the same or less than Amazon EC2 and S3. With its recent decision to lower prices by 21-33 percent, Microsoft gives the technical community confidence that the corporation wants to level the market - based on functionality, not price. It helped my customers to see Azure as a viable competitor.
But comparing Amazon and Microsoft prices is still a painful task. The Amazon EC2 website is so clumsy that there is one page describing the prices and comparative tables of services, for understanding which characteristics you need to return to the page describing the types of virtual machine instances. Looks like Amazon wants to create a cloud of misunderstanding.
The Azure Cost Calculator, by contrast, is simple to such an extent that it suffices to use a web form that calculates the cost of the services used on the fly, depending on the number of virtual machines selected based on the required performance. At the same time, you can mix and compare Windows and Linux deployments, add SQL instances, and so on. Simply, quickly, clearly - I, as a technical specialist and as a client, appreciate when companies use KISS .
Purely on the price positions, Microsoft is stepping on Amazon prices enough to make it worth noting. Below is a comparison of prices from May 7, 2013, based on publicly available prices. For Amazon, US East prices were used as the lowest prices for Amazon services in the USA.
As you can see, a practically similar instance of Medium Windows from Microsoft costs less by more than 12 percent. Before you say that "there are differences in the amount of memory," note that this difference is only 6 percent. If you look at the numbers, it still means that Microsoft is offering a price of 6 percent better than Amazon. For the organization that thinks about using these virtual machines non-stop for many months, this small difference is significant. For those who are interested in what lies behind the unit of EC2 processing power, you can read the official FAQ.
The same advantage in pure numbers at Microsoft and in the event that we grow to, for example, the Extra Large level:
If the client needs one of these copies to work 24/7 in production, it will cost him $ 6,289.92 per year for Amazon and $ 5,529.60 per year for Microsoft. $ 760.32 annual savings. For each additional virtual machine. Serious numbers are obtained.
Another area in which Microsoft is stacking Amazon is management. If you want to quickly deploy a virtual machine on Amazon, you first need to study a hefty directory, otherwise it may happen that you choose too large a copy and get a check-surprise. The patient will not get better until Amazon makes serious decisions on the number of steps that need to be taken to create an instance on EC2.
The Microsoft Azure Management Portal (also known as just the Portal) looks fairly seamless, easy to learn and manage, and logically balanced. The control panel of the same Amazon EC2 - the collapse of technical jargon and links. Not surprisingly, I enjoy working at the Azure management portal rather than digging into the Amazon dump.
Microsoft Management Portal is clear and clear. Want a virtual machine? Click on the large New button in the lower left corner, select the OS and fill in some required text fields. Further, the management portal will report in real time on the status of the deployed virtual machine.
One more thing - the management of various services from Amazon is illogically divided into different panels. EC2 management is different from S3 and RDS management. Why it was impossible to play beautifully and place everything on a single management portal, like in Azure? If I need to explain to small businesses how to manage multiple Amazon AWS services, I have no idea how to explain all this.
This is how Amazon offers to manage their online services. Each service has its own control panel.
I know perfectly well that most organizations will not spend a lot of time in online control panels, but there are many situations in which you need to turn virtual machines on or off or deploy test environments for various tasks. The approach to managing cloud services Microsoft looks much more solid, meaningful and “adult”, even considering that Amazon is in this market the longest. Age is not always useful, as it turned out.
Microsoft may be relative newcomers in the cloud arena, but they definitely work like veterans, judging by reports from the enterprise vendor of the Nasumi data warehouse systems. Nasumi published their second State of Cloud Storage report a couple of months ago, and Azure won in many ways, including performance and reliability. Nasumi supported their findings with a rather tough conclusion: “Microsoft Azure has gone far ahead in virtually all categories compared to Amazon S3.”
What categories did Nasumi talk about? Tests were conducted from November 2012 to January 2013:
• Speed: Azure turned out to be 56 percent faster than their rival Amazon S3.
• Availability: The Azure response rate was 25 percent faster than Amazon S3, which ranked second.
The only thing Amazon has bypassed Azure with is scalability, but also by only 1.3 percent. "Not only did Microsoft outperform its competitors in pure tests - their cloud storage platform did not generate a single error for 100 million read and write operations," the report says. Amazon tightly ranked second, but Nasumi is confident that Azure may well be the leader in cloud storage and cloud services.
In this review, we looked at Azure virtual machines only. But with all that we have seen, in this area Microsoft can limit only the sky. The platform already contains many offered services, for example, cloud SQL, mobile services, blobs, data storage, and Microsoft’s appetites for moving everything to the cloud do not diminish.
Take, for example, the ability to authenticate to Azure using Active Directory . Today, this feature is limited only by platform and federation with existing services and local AD infrastructure, but just imagine if we can take all the remaining local AD servers and put them into the cloud? I know this is real, and I expect it to start happening soon. Further research further assured me in the light of the latest news about the new project, which is under development. Under the code name Mohoro, Microsoft is considering developing cloud-based VDI, the market for which is now occupied by players like Citrix. If Microsoft does everything right and integrates this feature into Azure based on pay-for-use, VDI can be much cheaper and more affordable for small businesses.
Such VDI scenarios in the Windows ecosystem were traditionally available only to the enterprise. Why? Expensive iron; expensive software; complex licensing; huge planning costs; a complete twist on how an organization implements its desktop technology. Azure has already proven that it can provide a backend for implementing various scenarios. I have no doubt that they can do “VDI for the people” very soon.
And, if Windows passes the path to the pay-after-use model, the rest of the Windows products will subsequently go for Windows. Microsoft’s current effort to turn Office into a 365 platform doesn’t change the fact that software still needs to be downloaded and installed locally.
If Azure will develop in the next 5-10 years, all this can become a thing of the past. Imagine that you can simply choose which Office applications you want to use, click a button, and on the fly get them in a Windows desktop on Azure in a few seconds.
Is Microsoft Azure perfect? Of course not. There are problems, but they do not make the service less attractive. For example, reserving static IPs for virtual machines is still a pain when you delete a virtual machine. Still, Microsoft does not avoid children's mistakes with its project, for example, as happened in February last year. But, as with any other cloud service, there are problems, and they are solved. Let's wait and see what happens next. It’s not unlikely that Google Apps is prone to downtime.
If you are looking for a service that is flexible enough to implement various scenarios, has good prices and credibility in matters of security, it seems to me that it is impossible to ask more. Azure has gone from a backdated service to a full-fledged offer, which I have already used for many customers, and I hope to do more in the future.
It will be interesting how viable the idea with VDI is on Azure, and whether it will burn out or not. Some studies have already found that VDI is used by more than 80 percent of organizations, and the number is growing. In the meantime, as the industry is trying to get away from Redmond, such quality offers will push them back. I hope that others, such as Amazon, will not lag behind in this.
PS Thanks for the help in translating Peter Turaev.
I present to you a translation of an article from our foreign IT colleague about Windows Azure Virtual Machines. Due to the large number of idiomatic and simple verbal delights, in some places the translation is rather loose.
Some of the most important oppositions of Microsoft are not conducted openly, on a disputed field, where public opinion dominates, which is constantly covered by the media. But, if there is something that Microsoft has always done better than its competitors - it is plowing new virgin lands, finding new opportunities and accurate, but reliable processing. Apple and Samsung can, of course, continue to hold their nose along the course, consumer electronics will always be a dead end; Microsoft has much greater potential, being a rising star in the cloud arena. This confrontation began with the desire of Microsoft to transfer e-mail to the Office 365 cloud, then Windows Azure and XaaS are sent to the battle for dominance.
')
If you still think that we have not yet entered the era of “big data”, you are wildly mistaken. Our data needs have already reached astronomical levels, which confirms IBM: 90 percent of the data we have today was created only in the last two years . It is not at all surprising that most of these growing data needs are currently being transferred to a virtual environment, be it a local infrastructure running VMWare or Hyper-V or personally my choice: virtual machines in the cloud.
Before delving into my discussion of Microsoft Azure as a platform on which virtual machines can be placed, let me say that I and a few of my clients have been using this resource on a limited basis since about October of last year. Meanwhile, Microsoft quietly pulled the IaaS component of Windows Azure out of beta, which happened just a few weeks ago. Along with the remarkable roll-out SLA for virtual machines (99.95%), the company also seriously intended to get involved in a price war with the giants of the Amazon market, a war, the outcome of which cannot be predicted. So, if you thought that Microsoft positioned Azure as nothing more than some kind of home projector, you should think again.
Now is the hot time - resources are moving from the physical to the cloud. In my opinion, as a consultant to many small and medium-sized businesses in Chicago, virtual machines located in the cloud are more suitable for small organizations (up to 25 people), and there are reasons for this. Some of these — the most significant benefits of cloud virtual machines over virtual machines in the local infrastructure — are listed below:
• Minimum entry period . If serious local planning and extensive experience are required to deploy local infrastructure on Hyper-V or VMWare, Windows Azure can deploy virtual machines in minutes, abstracting the user from technical preparatory work.
• Low capital costs . Unlike the deployment of Hyper-V, which can result in thousands of dollars spent on hardware resources and licenses, you can simply turn on a virtual machine in Azure and pay $ 60-115 dollars per month.
• Unprecedented resiliency and availability . I have not yet met clients with local infrastructures that would have more than 95% uptime per month. Over time, system performance deteriorates. In this sense, in my experience, Azure has a wonderful uptime.
• Bandwidth . The latest virtual machines I worked with the client had a bandwidth of 110 megabits at 60 megabits. If you have such bandwidth, then consider yourself luckier than most local firms.
• Global remote access. Of course, in traditional infrastructures Remote Desktop is sometimes present, but it must always be configured, and here static IP, and so on, especially if there are several servers. Azure provides a pre-configured FQDN for each virtual machine.
• No concern for license. If the local virtual infrastructure will always have licensing issues (one way or another), the virtual machines in Azure abstract the user from this, including the cost of the license in the cost of the virtual machine itself. Therefore, Azure virtual machines are fully prepared for transfer to Production.
There are other aspects, but my first impressions of Azure were extremely positive. No, there were problems, but if you compare it with Amazon EC2, which I used at the same time, I prefer Azure.
Everything is simple there, prices are very decent compared to competitors, and there is the flexibility that any virtualization project needs. Microsoft even provides the ability to run in the Linux cloud.
Using Azure means that you have access to the fastest communication channels. The Microsoft data center infrastructure is one of the best in the world, and the screenshot above with speed test results for a Server 2012 virtual machine located in Production in Azure speaks for itself.
Amazon and Microsoft are not the only ones who are in the virtual machine arena in the cloud. Some time ago, RackSpace and many small vendors such as SoftSys , PayPerCloud and MyHosting entered the game . I am not writing this in order to somehow belittle these guys, because I have some experience with SoftSys, but they simply cannot compete with Azure in two main aspects: the number of functions provided and the price. In these two aspects, Microsoft and Amazon are leading.
Of course, Google launched the Compute Engine in mid-2012. But, since they only support virtual machines on Linux, and with certain boot issues, I don’t see Google as a serious player. Until. In my opinion, the service needs to add support for virtual machines running Windows in order to compete with Azure and EC2.
Good old price war? Nothing like this
I am not one of those who value companies for value alone - I know that there are many more factors that play a role in quality comparison. But today budgets play a role, and when the quality bar is the same, they look at budgets. Therefore, Microsoft must retain Amazon if they want to turn the developing Azure into a service that everyone will use. Also, as Microsoft was beaten by Exchange providers with its Office 365, I think that a virtual infrastructure services arena was created, with just two players - Amazon and Microsoft.
This helps Microsoft keep the bar on pricing the same or less than Amazon EC2 and S3. With its recent decision to lower prices by 21-33 percent, Microsoft gives the technical community confidence that the corporation wants to level the market - based on functionality, not price. It helped my customers to see Azure as a viable competitor.
But comparing Amazon and Microsoft prices is still a painful task. The Amazon EC2 website is so clumsy that there is one page describing the prices and comparative tables of services, for understanding which characteristics you need to return to the page describing the types of virtual machine instances. Looks like Amazon wants to create a cloud of misunderstanding.
The Azure Cost Calculator, by contrast, is simple to such an extent that it suffices to use a web form that calculates the cost of the services used on the fly, depending on the number of virtual machines selected based on the required performance. At the same time, you can mix and compare Windows and Linux deployments, add SQL instances, and so on. Simply, quickly, clearly - I, as a technical specialist and as a client, appreciate when companies use KISS .
Purely on the price positions, Microsoft is stepping on Amazon prices enough to make it worth noting. Below is a comparison of prices from May 7, 2013, based on publicly available prices. For Amazon, US East prices were used as the lowest prices for Amazon services in the USA.
As you can see, a practically similar instance of Medium Windows from Microsoft costs less by more than 12 percent. Before you say that "there are differences in the amount of memory," note that this difference is only 6 percent. If you look at the numbers, it still means that Microsoft is offering a price of 6 percent better than Amazon. For the organization that thinks about using these virtual machines non-stop for many months, this small difference is significant. For those who are interested in what lies behind the unit of EC2 processing power, you can read the official FAQ.
The same advantage in pure numbers at Microsoft and in the event that we grow to, for example, the Extra Large level:
If the client needs one of these copies to work 24/7 in production, it will cost him $ 6,289.92 per year for Amazon and $ 5,529.60 per year for Microsoft. $ 760.32 annual savings. For each additional virtual machine. Serious numbers are obtained.
Management is also considered, and here Azure is above EC2
Another area in which Microsoft is stacking Amazon is management. If you want to quickly deploy a virtual machine on Amazon, you first need to study a hefty directory, otherwise it may happen that you choose too large a copy and get a check-surprise. The patient will not get better until Amazon makes serious decisions on the number of steps that need to be taken to create an instance on EC2.
The Microsoft Azure Management Portal (also known as just the Portal) looks fairly seamless, easy to learn and manage, and logically balanced. The control panel of the same Amazon EC2 - the collapse of technical jargon and links. Not surprisingly, I enjoy working at the Azure management portal rather than digging into the Amazon dump.
Microsoft Management Portal is clear and clear. Want a virtual machine? Click on the large New button in the lower left corner, select the OS and fill in some required text fields. Further, the management portal will report in real time on the status of the deployed virtual machine.
One more thing - the management of various services from Amazon is illogically divided into different panels. EC2 management is different from S3 and RDS management. Why it was impossible to play beautifully and place everything on a single management portal, like in Azure? If I need to explain to small businesses how to manage multiple Amazon AWS services, I have no idea how to explain all this.
This is how Amazon offers to manage their online services. Each service has its own control panel.
I know perfectly well that most organizations will not spend a lot of time in online control panels, but there are many situations in which you need to turn virtual machines on or off or deploy test environments for various tasks. The approach to managing cloud services Microsoft looks much more solid, meaningful and “adult”, even considering that Amazon is in this market the longest. Age is not always useful, as it turned out.
Performance and Reliability - Azure Prize
Microsoft may be relative newcomers in the cloud arena, but they definitely work like veterans, judging by reports from the enterprise vendor of the Nasumi data warehouse systems. Nasumi published their second State of Cloud Storage report a couple of months ago, and Azure won in many ways, including performance and reliability. Nasumi supported their findings with a rather tough conclusion: “Microsoft Azure has gone far ahead in virtually all categories compared to Amazon S3.”
What categories did Nasumi talk about? Tests were conducted from November 2012 to January 2013:
• Speed: Azure turned out to be 56 percent faster than their rival Amazon S3.
• Availability: The Azure response rate was 25 percent faster than Amazon S3, which ranked second.
The only thing Amazon has bypassed Azure with is scalability, but also by only 1.3 percent. "Not only did Microsoft outperform its competitors in pure tests - their cloud storage platform did not generate a single error for 100 million read and write operations," the report says. Amazon tightly ranked second, but Nasumi is confident that Azure may well be the leader in cloud storage and cloud services.
The possibilities of Azure look limitless
In this review, we looked at Azure virtual machines only. But with all that we have seen, in this area Microsoft can limit only the sky. The platform already contains many offered services, for example, cloud SQL, mobile services, blobs, data storage, and Microsoft’s appetites for moving everything to the cloud do not diminish.
Take, for example, the ability to authenticate to Azure using Active Directory . Today, this feature is limited only by platform and federation with existing services and local AD infrastructure, but just imagine if we can take all the remaining local AD servers and put them into the cloud? I know this is real, and I expect it to start happening soon. Further research further assured me in the light of the latest news about the new project, which is under development. Under the code name Mohoro, Microsoft is considering developing cloud-based VDI, the market for which is now occupied by players like Citrix. If Microsoft does everything right and integrates this feature into Azure based on pay-for-use, VDI can be much cheaper and more affordable for small businesses.
Such VDI scenarios in the Windows ecosystem were traditionally available only to the enterprise. Why? Expensive iron; expensive software; complex licensing; huge planning costs; a complete twist on how an organization implements its desktop technology. Azure has already proven that it can provide a backend for implementing various scenarios. I have no doubt that they can do “VDI for the people” very soon.
And, if Windows passes the path to the pay-after-use model, the rest of the Windows products will subsequently go for Windows. Microsoft’s current effort to turn Office into a 365 platform doesn’t change the fact that software still needs to be downloaded and installed locally.
If Azure will develop in the next 5-10 years, all this can become a thing of the past. Imagine that you can simply choose which Office applications you want to use, click a button, and on the fly get them in a Windows desktop on Azure in a few seconds.
Microsoft (almost) does everything right with Azure
Is Microsoft Azure perfect? Of course not. There are problems, but they do not make the service less attractive. For example, reserving static IPs for virtual machines is still a pain when you delete a virtual machine. Still, Microsoft does not avoid children's mistakes with its project, for example, as happened in February last year. But, as with any other cloud service, there are problems, and they are solved. Let's wait and see what happens next. It’s not unlikely that Google Apps is prone to downtime.
If you are looking for a service that is flexible enough to implement various scenarios, has good prices and credibility in matters of security, it seems to me that it is impossible to ask more. Azure has gone from a backdated service to a full-fledged offer, which I have already used for many customers, and I hope to do more in the future.
It will be interesting how viable the idea with VDI is on Azure, and whether it will burn out or not. Some studies have already found that VDI is used by more than 80 percent of organizations, and the number is growing. In the meantime, as the industry is trying to get away from Redmond, such quality offers will push them back. I hope that others, such as Amazon, will not lag behind in this.
PS Thanks for the help in translating Peter Turaev.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/181027/
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