Microsoft Azure: What’s In The Clouds

The market continues to grow, companies are expanding their presence in the clouds, new technologies are organically interlinked into cloud platforms, and Microsoft Azure is one of the market leaders.

Azure is a beautiful, and perhaps the most successful Microsoft product name. The cloud computing platform got such a bright name in 2010.

Study the clouds closely

Cloud service is a solution for providing clients with software and hardware computing powers. These can be servers, storages, communication channels, software environments, applications. It is possible to have all of the listed components or to customize individually.

There are several features of any cloud platform:

• resources — the supplier contains the computing infrastructure and distributes its resources to each of the consumers;
• connection — cloud service clients can access the platform through universal interface;
• independent management — the quantity and parameters of the resources of the cloud platform that each consumer needs to determine independently and receive on demand;
• flexibility — the provision of necessary services to the client, as well as the regulation of their characteristics occurs automatically;
• data on consumed resources — the cloud service provider keeps track of the resources used by the client, and provides information about them automatically in a generalized form.

What is Azure Cloud

The Microsoft Azure platform includes more than a hundred products with the most popular ones, including the blockchain workbench:

• Windows and Linux virtual machines;
• Azure SQL Relational Database;
• globally distributed multi-model database Azure Cosmos DB;
• a service for working with Azure Kubernetes cluster software containers;
• intelligent human interaction algorithms Cognitive Services;
• Windows virtual desktop;
• application service for mobile and web clients;
• PlayFab game development and management service;
• Serverless Architecture Computing Azure Features;
• service for connecting to Blockchain Workbench architecture for blockchain projects.

Organizations like Siemens, Adobe, Dodo Pizza, Honeywell, 3M and Toyota use the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

Cloud competitors

The main rivals in the cloud computing market are AWS (Amazon's cloud platform) and Microsoft Azure. As Right Scale's research shows, Amazon’s product is a leader today, but Azure is growing steadily and will soon be able to compete with AWS. However, according to Zdnet.com, in terms of annual revenue in 2018, Microsoft is still ahead of Amazon in terms of cloud services.

The closest competitors of the two cloud computing giants are Google, IBM, Oracle and Alibaba.

Still, according to the mentioned study by Right Scale, most organizations are not going to put their business at risk by moving all their resources to one type of cloud service.

Can the situation in the cloud computing market change?

Yes, it can. The developers of Microsoft Azure shouldn’t rest calm while wearing the yellow jersey of the leader. AWS is a strong competitor and will not give up easily. Other large companies are developing dynamically and may soon be ready to provide services that will attract a lot of customers.

Besides, the latest technologies and applications of cloud computing (machine learning, serverless applications, big data) require a platform that will satisfy their needs for flexibility, scalability and computing power. Without continuous improvement and intensive development, they can lose potential.