By Jim White (Director of Training and Instructor)

This is the first of a two part blog post on considering Windows Azure for your applications.  See the 2nd posting next week.

Cloud computing, and in particular Microsoft Windows Azure are hot topics in IT circles today.  A report on CNN has even suggested that Internet users will live in the cloud by 2020 (see here).  Why is cloud computing ?the next big thing? in IT? Here are five reasons you should explore Windows Azure ? Microsoft?s cloud computing platform.

1. Save money

In fact, I really wanted to name this blog post 10 reasons to consider moving an application to the cloud and have #1 ? 5 be about money. As that would be unfair to the reader, I kept it to five, but the importance of saving money via cloud computing and Azure should not be understated. Buying, building, and operating a data center, no matter how small it is, is an expensive endeavor. The initial costs for hardware, network, and software give managers sticker shock. Operating costs (electricity, heating/cooling, and personnel to operate it) are growing expenses. Just about the time you have it up and running efficiently, it (hardware, networks, OS, etc.) need to be upgrade. Because the demands on the data center do not stay constant, most of the time your data center is either over or under utilized. If your business takes off, you may not have enough computing resources to meet the need. If stay in front of resource demand, you have long periods of excess capacity.

Windows Azure affords organizations data center resources (and more) in a pay-for-use model. Cloud computing is called utility computing because like water or electricity, you pay for what you use and not what you think you might use ? or for having to build the entire water pump house or electric generator all on your own. Don?t take my word for the savings. Prove it for yourself. In fact, so confident are Microsoft and others about the savings in Azure that there are two return on investment (ROI) calculators that allow you to size up your savings. Microsoft?s own, very detailed and thorough ROI calculator is here. You can also check out Neudesic?s calculator (itself a cloud application) out for a simpler-big-picture ROI report here.

2. Scaling

Most organizations have a hard time building an application or data store that must ultimately support incredible scale. Most applications and data stores start out relatively small, and through success take on more and larger needs. How do you plan to take that garage web site to the top ten most visited sites of the Internet? Azure allows you to scale by adding more resources in support of your application on demand. Whereas it might take days or months to provision new hardware, networks, software, etc. to support increases of demand on your applications and data stores today, you can provision what for all practical purposes is an infinite supply of computing resources in Azure in a matter of minutes or hours. Remember, scaling computing resources is often a two way street. You may need extra storage and computing resources today, but you do not want to pay for that extra forever do you? Say you have an application that you know is going to achieve a spike in utilization during a short period (think Dominos Pizza on Super Bowl weekend ? they are in fact a user of Azure ? see here) but after that, it?s back to normal computing. Azure allows you to take down those same resources as fast as you put them up.

3. High Availability

No one likes to have to answer the beeper or cell phone go off in the middle of the night ? especially when it?s to learn that a server, network device, database, or application has gone haywire. Software engineers like to code and solve business problems. Baby sitting equipment typically comes with the territory, but it can hardly be classified as satisfying work. Let someone else manage the environments that run and support your applications and data store! Azure provides a service level agreement (SLQ) backed environment (computational resources are guaranteed at 99.95% up time ? see here). If you doubt the SLA is being achieved, you can see an Azure data center dashboard that tells you what the up-time of the Microsoft cloud is today (see here).

In Azure, if the server box running your application or data store dies or an application running on an Azure virtual machine falls over, the Azure Fabric Controller brings it back up automatically. Furthermore, all data stored in Azure (Azure storage or SQL Azure) is replicated three times. So, applications and more importantly users should never see unavailable applications or data. Geographical redundancy is something Azure developers have requested and may be available in future releases. That is, your application and/data may be made available in multiple Microsoft data centers located across the world to provide expanded availability. Even if one data center were down, the other would still be up and take on the requests. With Azure, organizations can focus on their core business solutions and not on keeping a data center operational.

4. Rapid Application Development/Testing

If you have ever worked in a relatively large organization and started on a new project, you have probably experienced the team down-cycles at the beginning of a project when new equipment, development environments, etc. have to be approved, then ordered, setup and made operational. What a drag on the ?rapid? part of RAD development. If someone in your organization has an idea about how to make the company more money or improve operations, how long does it take to get that idea in front of customers or decision makers? If the answer is too long, perhaps you need a better way to provision the RAD environments and get product to market faster. Azure offers a ready and waiting environment with developer tools to allow teams to get prototypes and early versions of applications up and running quickly and cheaply. Moreover, since Azure is .NET based, a lot of the tools and existing .NET skills can be applied and reused in cloud computing. If the project fails or needs to be moved to a more tightly managed environment, the cloud resources can be shed just as quickly with no wasted and unused equipment standing around. Azure can serve as an incubator to hot ideas that can help businesses move and react quicker.

5. Geographical Distribution

Who are your customers today? Are they all in your city? Your state? Your country? Increasingly, applications, content and data is shrinking the world. However, your applications and data are still probably located where you are. Is this a problem? Maybe. If your customers are around the world, you may be required to have your applications and data where the customers are and not where you are. Increasing legal and regulatory demands from governing bodies (local, national and international) make it necessary to put applications and data within certain geopolitical boundaries. Tax laws may encourage you to host your application and data in certain areas of the world while avoiding others. And even though the speed of light that pushes data through fiber optic cable is good, it may not be enough when that data has to travel half way across the world in a time-critical transaction. As many organizations ?go global?, they need to find a way to distribute applications and data geographically (without the expense and trouble of building their own data centers in several locations across the world). Microsoft has already done that for you. Azure is hosted in data centers around the world. When you build your application for any one Azure site, you can easily deploy it to an ever-increasing set of Azure data centers with no changes ? free (except for the actual resources you use in the cloud) geographical distribution.

If you would like to learn more about Windows Azure, check out our training course here. If your consultants can help you ?navigate in the clouds?, please contact Ryan McCabe for assistance. Also, I invite you to join the Windows Azure User Group ? it?s a virtual users group ? where you?ll find some great educational material and virtually meet people discussing Azure.