Author: Waqar Azeem

Azure Pricing Calculator : Planning VM deployment you might be concerned about forecasting and calculating runtime costs. There is a pricing calculator that calculates pricing on the type of subscription you have i.e. Pay as you or enterprise agreement. There is a separate pricing plan for Windows and Linux virtual machines. If one is prepaying one to three-year term for any VM instance size in a region, it can get discounts. Azure Hybrid Benefit is useful if you have a Software Assurance licensing agreement with Microsoft, using those licenses in Azure and get up to a 49% discount on runtime. …

Microsoft Azure provides you different options for a Virtual machine’s storage environment and one can make between standard versus premium disks. Standard Disk Storage : Standard disks are the more cost-effective option because you’re using mechanical HDD storage. These standard disks are stored in an Azure storage account.  There is a standard SSD tier for which you can pay the standard tier price for higher speed solid-state storage, SSD storage.  Standard tier has different performance guarantees, so Microsoft recommends using standard SSD only for dev, test, and for entry-level production applications. The Metric used for storage in Azure is input/output…

Microsoft Azure offers some other types of storage just beside standard vs premium storage, which is Managed vs Unmanaged Disks.  Unmanaged Disk :  Unmanaged disks were the legacy way to store your VM storage. The unmanaged storage method involves storing your VHDs and storage accounts that you create and manage. VHDs are stored as page binary large objects or BLOBs with a maximum capacity of 256 TB of storage per VM.  One has to manage the storage account’s availability, with a number of different replication options.  Another important thing is that there is a 20,000 IOPS limit across all VM…

Cloud Computing has its own pros and cons from the point of view of a user, there are benefits and risks adopting this approach.  Benefits : Easier deployment : You can deploy the application faster because there is no local installation required. Unlike an on-premises where you have to put on your own servers, configure it, get it running, with cloud computing, you can just point your browser at the app in the cloud and start using it. Now, in reality, there might be some deployment work required with the customization and so on, but still, cloud deployments are typically…

Just as cloud computing has both benefits and risks for users of the software, so do it has benefits and risks for software vendors as well. Among the benefits are these.  Cloud Computing can provide a more predictable revenue stream than traditional licensing. Rather than the big chunks of money received each time they sell, a vendor gets per resource, per month revenues. That predictability is attractive for a bunch of reasons.  Cloud Computing can also lower support costs because you’ve got this shared multi-tenant resources that you’re maintaining. You don’t have to maintain redundant resources within your data centers. …

One of the great benefits of the public cloud is that you can size your virtual machines and resize them as your business needs and as workload loads change. We can design the virtual network environment on which the VM will reside, and also plan for high availability.  Choosing the Right VM Size and Storage Option While dealing with virtual machines and infrastructure as a service, also called IaaS in Microsoft Azure public cloud, we are talking about compute power.  To understand the Azure Compute Unit or ACU. Think about that you’re never going to see inside of an Azure…

There are lots of ways to think about the impact of cloud platforms. For startup companies, this has been transformative. Now it is much cheaper and much easier to do a technology-based startup because you can use public cloud platforms rather than buy your own hardware. This is a big win, even for enterprise IT, cloud platforms are having a huge impact. Here’s one way to think about that. Traditionally, the enterprise IT default platform looked like this. The clients were PCs and laptops. Everyone had their own internal data center infrastructure with servers, and operating systems, and databases, and…

Cloud platforms are an essential aspect of cloud computing. Many organizations rely on external service providers that run cloud applications, SaaS applications, and provide cloud platforms. Organizations in some cases, bring cloud platform technologies on-premises in the form of private clouds.  Cloud platforms today offer a very wide range of services like the advent of usage-based pricing, letting you pay for what you use, rather than having a server dedicated to you full time, you could instead rent virtual machines by the hour or by the minute, rent data storage by the gigabyte, and so on. Usage-based pricing was a…

Nowadays companies have started to rely on packaged software applications they purchase. Most of the latest packaged software are running in the cloud, rather than running on-premises in their own data centers known as Software as a Service.  The idea of having applications that run remotely at service providers that you access from your company is not new, it’s been around forever. Companies use email, SharePoint sites, and all sorts of business applications, hosters elsewhere.  How is SaaS different?  Traditionally, when a hoster provided an application, they ran an instance of the complete application just for your organization. In SaaS,…

Organizations using cloud computing can still run some applications on-premises. They can use service providers to provide cloud applications, SaaS, and cloud platforms. Private clouds bring the technology of the cloud into an organization’s own on-premises world. Traditionally it was taking public cloud services and providing them on-premises. A thing which is important is that Private doesn’t mean to bring some cloud technologies into your own on-premises world. It’s just not fair to begin referring to your on-premises data center with no changes as a private cloud. The private cloud can be a confusing market largely because vendors use the…