How the cloud makes life easier for startups

A beginner, and even an experienced startup, often faces the challenge of choosing a hosting service, restrictions on purchasing equipment, and insufficient human resources to maintain the system. In addition, the start-up enthusiasm significantly reduces the level of material investments at the start and with further scaling of its service.

To overcome all these difficulties will help the cloud platform, the use of which will allow a startup to quickly launch its own solution, provide infrastructure and manage resources.
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Microsoft Azure is a full-featured cloud platform that is available to startups completely free of charge through the BizSpark program.

Using BizSpark, a startup receives an MSDN Ultimate package (equivalent to $ 15,000 ), which allows, in addition to cloud services, up to $ 9,000 a year, to obtain Microsoft licensed software for developing, testing and launching its applications for free.

Many novice IT startups are not familiar with BizSpark, and are unaware of what tasks a startup can be solved using a cloud platform.

In order to take advantage of the cloud platform, it was convenient for any IT specialist who is not even familiar with the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft Azure cloud service offers full support for a large number of programming languages (NET, PHP, Python, Java, Node.js), development tools, frameworks , repositories and other tools.

Microsoft offers startups access to cloud services through the BizSpark program.

Terms and features of the program BizSpark

Startups - participants of the Microsoft BizSpark program, are provided with a monthly balance of $ 150 per account and additional discounts for using Microsoft Azure services in order to develop, test and deploy your services.

A startup team can register up to 5 accounts and get $ 750 per month to use cloud capacity. And thus, the team will have the opportunity to build a complete IT project infrastructure in Azure using existing accounts, for example as follows:

1 account - Placement of the project site
2 account - Software development and everything connected with it
3 account - Internal software version testing
4 account - Environment for the final check of the software before launch, without prejudice to current users
5 account - Tools for managing team work

Participation in BizSpark is free, and you only need to register your startup program.

Azure capabilities for startup needs

When a startup receives a BizSpark subscription, it chooses how to spend the balance provided to Azure. Microsoft provides the full functionality of its cloud platform for a startup, without any restrictions.

You can use your $ 750 for any Azure services, depending only on the needs of the startup - for example, for virtual machines, websites, cloud services, mobile services, storage, SQL databases, content delivery networks, HDInsight, media services and more. .

There are a huge number of usage scenarios for Azure services for the needs of a startup.

Virtual machine usage scenarios :

Using ready-made images, you can easily deploy SQL Server in a few minutes. You can create virtual machines for rapid development and testing , or deploy complex production applications covering many Azure regions.
You can deploy a full range of open and community-supported operating systems , as well as software solutions in Azure. In Azure, you can choose the full range of Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu and SUSE, community-supported solutions, such as Chef, Puppet and Docker, along with other products such as Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server.
With the help of virtual networks, we can monitor and configure all aspects of your work with the network, identifying subnets and preferred DNS IP addresses. You can securely connect to virtual machines in Azure over a secure VPN connection over the Internet
You can more widely use D-series virtual machines to suit your needs. These VMs are faster and store more data: they have faster processors, more memory, and a temporary disk based on SSD storage, which significantly increases the speed of your VM's temporary storage.
Run your HPC applications on high-performance A8 and A9 computing instances in Azure, and take advantage of the back-end network with an MPI delay of less than 3 ms and a non-blocking bandwidth of 32 Gb / s. This background network uses RDMA technology that allows parallel applications to scale across thousands of cores. Azure provides large amounts of memory and CPU class HPC for maximum performance. Scale your resources and pay only for what you use.

Or scripts for using websites with SQL databases:

Use ASP.NET, Java, PHP, Node.js or Python. Run popular web applications and CMS solutions , including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Umbraco and DotNetNuke
Azure makes it easy to create data processing solutions and use them with your web applications. Microsoft SQL, MySQL, Document DB, Search, MongoDB, Redis and Azure Table Storage are supported. Test your applications with SQL and MySQL databases for free
Run web applications in a high availability environment using automatic fix . Web applications deployed using Azure websites are self-contained and hosted on virtual machines dedicated to your applications.
Azure allows you to quickly scale up or down to handle any incoming client load. Manually select the number and size of virtual machines or set autoscaling for servers
on load or on schedule
The Azure platform allows you to create websites that use data from your own data center. Hybrid connectivity and VNET make it easy to securely access data from local data centers or anywhere in the world. Use Azure Active Directory to organize access only to your employees or partners
Configuring continuous deployment workflows using VSO, GitHub, TeamCity, Hudson, or BitBucket allows you to automatically create, test, and deploy a web application
Integration with Visual Studio allows you to centrally implement a full cycle of application management. By integrating with Azure VS, you can create and continuously publish your web application. With VS, you can debug in the cloud and use live log data
Create multiple private test environments and staging environments for your web applications. Use them for testing before deployment. You will be able to go into the work environment without any delay. Web applications are preloaded, which ensures maximum efficiency for the client

As well as scenarios for the use of mobile services with databases:

A highly scalable push notification subsystem that can quickly send millions of messages to iOS, Android, Windows or Kindle devices. Using a notification hub, you can send notifications to specific users or to entire groups of users with a few lines of code, regardless of the platform used.
Integration with social networks Facebook, Twitter, Google. Mobile services allow you to customize user verification with user accounts with just a few clicks.
Simplified configuration of built-in auto scaling for mobile services and notification hubs to suit your application needs. Automatic scaling allows you to expand or collapse resources depending on their actual use.
Create a server part in C # or NodeJS for any mobile application on iOS, Android, Windows, HTML5.
Integration with SQL, MongoDB, DocumentDB, search service
Implement offline data synchronization in your application. Do not limit the application to only those areas where there is access to the Internet. Save data locally and synchronize it when the connection is resumed.

And this is only part of the capabilities of the cloud platform from Microsoft, which, by the way, is developing rapidly and provides new services to developers almost monthly.

Additional materials, useful links and resources on “Microsoft Azure for startups”.

Successful cloud startups

BizSpark program for start-ups in Russia exists not the first year and has its own history, accumulated experience and outstanding graduates.

BizSpark graduates are startups who, within the program, using all the advantages of the cloud platform, built a profitable business and won large audiences of users by offering them quality solutions:

News360 - a popular news service on all platforms

The solution includes a tool that allows processing and linguistic analysis of more than 150,000 articles daily in real time. It analyzes more than 700,000 objects: companies, people, brands and locations; analyzes the place and topics covered by each article; collects articles into history clusters; selects visual elements for the stories.

When the need arose to expand the server infrastructure, News360 received help and additional resources as part of the Microsoft BizSpark program.

The Azure platform allowed News360 to avoid the complexity of the IT infrastructure and additional costs for it. News360 works with a wide international audience. Therefore, the company benefits from the fact that Microsoft has numerous Azure data centers around the world.

Read more about the company case.

LinguaLeo - online service for the study and practical development of the English language

Based on the capabilities of the Azure cloud platform, the LinguaLeo team was able to quickly create the first version of the product and bring it to market in 2-3 months. This was facilitated by the technical support services provided to start-ups in the framework of the Microsoft BizSpark program. Microsoft not only provided LinguaLeo with free software and resources for processing and storing data, but also provided support when launching and promoting the solution.

Details of the case can be found here.

FreshOffice - an ecosystem for managing sales and business processes

Now the average size of FreshOffice databases is 1-5 GB, while this is enough for customers. In Azure, there are about 1,000 databases at a time, and when a FreshOffice client requests a new database for itself, it is created instantly.

Within one or two minutes, the client receives an absolutely finished platform with an application that works with its database, account, the database itself, the database immediately has backup copies, i.e. it runs almost instantly. Thanks to Azure, the service is provided as fast as possible.

Detailed description of the case.

Acumatica , whose development office is located in Russia, and sales are currently focused on the US market, is developing an integrated set of ERP applications designed to increase the productivity of medium-sized enterprises.
Acumatica's ERP system is available to customers via the Internet using a web browser.

To develop such a solution, the company chose the Azure cloud platform, which allowed it to provide software for ERP and accounting in the cloud as a service (SaaS), offering customers a low-cost solution that does not require the customer to purchase, configure and maintain their own computer infrastructure, including At least one application server with Internet Information Services (IIS) and one Microsoft SQL Server database server.

Full description of the case.

And the list of successful startups and companies developing their business with Microsoft Azure is constantly increasing.

Conclusion

Within the BizSpark program, Microsoft provides startups with an excellent opportunity to build their solutions using modern technologies, without spending huge time and money resources to purchase equipment, tools and licenses.

The capabilities of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform are not limited to infrastructure, but the technologies supported by the Azure cloud go far beyond the Microsoft ecosystem of products.
A startup that uses a Linux server will feel in the Microsoft Azure cloud as good as a startup with a solution on a Windows Server.

Migrating existing solutions to the cloud will be provided by consulting Microsoft experts at azurerus@microsoft.com
Microsoft Azure is an opportunity to become a high-tech startup that responds quickly to changing audiences, creates cross-platform solutions and competitive applications by introducing unique features.

useful links

Registration in the BizSpark program
Try Azure for free for 30 days!
- Microsoft Azure Development Center (azurehub.ru) - scripts, tutorials, examples, design recommendations
- Twitter.com/windowsazure_ru - the latest Microsoft Azure news
- Microsoft Azure Community on Facebook - experts, questions
Explore Microsoft Virtual Academy courses on cloud and other technologies
Download free or trial Visual Studio
Become a universal Windows application developer

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/243561/

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