Microsoft Azure - Introduction

Editor's Notes

• #3: Speaking Points: There are numerous terms and definitions floating around in the industry for “the cloud”, “cloud computing”, “cloud services”, etc. Microsoft thinks of the cloud as simply an approach to computing that enables applications to be delivered at scale for a variety of workloads and client devices. The cloud can help deliver IT as a standardized service…freeing you up to focus on your business
• #4: Slide Objectives: Explain the three established industry terms for cloud services Speaker Notes: There is a lot of talk in the industry about different terms like Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, and Software as a Service. Since PDC08 when we first announced the Windows Azure our focus has been on delivering a platform as a service offering where you can build applications. Where the platform abstracts you from the complexities of building and running applications. We fundamentally believe that the future path forward for development is by providing a platform. In fact, as you’ll see in a few minutes, we believe that there are a number of new capabilities that should be delivered as services to the platform. Notes: There is a lot of confusion in the industry when it comes to the cloud. It’s important that you understand both what is happening in the industry and how we think about the cloud. This is the most commonly used taxonomy for differentiating between types of cloud services. The industry has defined three categories of services: IaaS – a set of infrastructure level capabilities such as an operating system, network connectivity, etc. that are delivered as pay for use services and can be used to host applications. PaaS – higher level sets of functionality that are delivered as consumable services for developers who are building applications. PaaS is about abstracting developers from the underlying infrastructure to enable applications to quickly be composed. SaaS – applications that are delivered using a service delivery model where organizations can simply consume and use the application. Typically an organization would pay for the use of the application or the application could be monetized through ad revenue. It is important to note that these 3 types of services may exist independently of one another or combined with one another.
• #5: Slide Objectives: Explain the differences and relationship between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS in more detail. Speaking Points: Here’s another way to look at the cloud services taxonomy and how this taxonomy maps to the components in an IT infrastructure. Packaged Software With packaged software a customer would be responsible for managing the entire stack – ranging from the network connectivity to the applications. IaaS With Infrastructure as a Service, the lower levels of the stack are managed by a vendor. Some of these components can be provided by traditional hosters – in fact most of them have moved to having a virtualized offering. Very few actually provide an OS The customer is still responsible for managing the OS through the Applications. For the developer, an obvious benefit with IaaS is that it frees the developer from many concerns when provisioning physical or virtual machines. This was one of the earliest and primary use cases for Amazon Web Services Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). Developers were able to readily provision virtual machines (AMIs) on EC2, develop and test solutions and, often, run the results ‘in production’. The only requirement was a credit card to pay for the services. PaaS With Platform as a Service, everything from the network connectivity through the runtime is provided and managed by the platform vendor. The Windows Azure best fits in this category today. In fact because we don’t provide access to the underlying virtualization or operating system today, we’re often referred to as not providing IaaS. PaaS offerings further reduce the developer burden by additionally supporting the platform runtime and related application services. With PaaS, the developer can, almost immediately, begin creating the business logic for an application. Potentially, the increases in productivity are considerable and, because the hardware and operational aspects of the cloud platform are also managed by the cloud platform provider, applications can quickly be taken from an idea to reality very quickly. SaaS Finally, with SaaS, a vendor provides the application and abstracts you from all of the underlying components.
• #9: And you get all the goodness shown in the previous slides across the WW
• #15: App Service has everything you need to build apps that target both web and mobile clients from a single app back-end. Using API Apps, you can connect your app to dozens of popular services like Office 365 and salesforce.com in minutes, and integrate your own APIs so they can be used within any app. And finally with Logic Apps, you can automate business processes using a simple no-code experience.
• #17: Speaker notes: Start simple Emphasize rapid deployment of Web Apps from choice of Asp.Net starter applications to thousands of pre-built certified, opensource, and community software applications, add-ons, and data analysis platforms pre-configured for Azure. Explain how Web Apps use automatic load balancing to scale out. With Web Apps its easy to scale out automatically with increasing instance count using autoscale features e.g. CPU Load, scheduled Easily improve performance of Web Apps and reduce latency of by changing to right instance size with zero downtime Supports cron jobs Code smart Leverage existing skills to start coding for Web Apps without expensive retraining: Languages: .NET, Java, NodeJS, PHP, Python. Databases: SQL Server, MySql . Start coding with any development tools on any platforms such as Linux, OSX and Windows. Go live Built for DevOps – Agility through continuous deployment. Encourages iterative development and improves developer productivity through continuous automated deployment enabled by Web Apps’ integrated source control connectivity to Team Foundation Server(TFS) and Git. Easily monitor key performance metrics in a verbose or minimal fashion. Easily access monitoring data from a storage account externally for further analysis. Easily enable diagnostics logging and add instrumentation. Easy access to information logged.
• #18: Speaking Notes Azure Mobile Services is a Backend-as-a-Service Instead of you having to design, build, test, deploy, manage, and upgrade your whole backend, we do it for you Features of Mobile Services Storage – SQL DB Authentication – built in support for social providers w/ ability to custom auth Backend logic – data validation, logical flows, etc Push Notifications – across all major mobile platforms Scheduler – backend job processing
• #23: Talking Points: With Azure IoT Suite we give you a very comprehensive solution that’s designed to help you connect your devices, whether a few hundred or millions across the world, analyze all the data coming from these devices and take action from the insights by integrating with your back end systems. IoT Suite bring together and offer the following capabilities: Device connectivity and security: Connect to millions of devices simultaneously. Enhance security of your IoT solutions by taking advantage of per-device authentication to communicate with devices that have the appropriate credentials. Revoke access rights to specific devices to maintain the integrity of your system. Data Ingestion & Command & Control: Establish reliable, bi-directional communication with these assets, even if they are intermittently connected, and analyze—and act on—incoming telemetry data. Workflow automation: Integrates with your company’s existing back-end systems to enable you to make the best use of the data and processes you already have. Whether it’s as simple as sending a text or integrating with your CRM or EPP system Dashboards & Visualization: Create powerful and rich visualization experience and finally Preconfigured solutions: One of the biggest value we can provide is helping you develop IoT solutions faster. This will not only allow you to do more PoCs and pilots, it will also help accelerate the long project cycles we spoke about earlier. We do this by offering preconfigured solutions for the more common IoT scenarios.