Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform that is used to develop and manage applications and services such as database, networking, storage, compute etc. It provides both IaaS and PaaS services.
Primary Components of Azure
Given below are some key components that make up Microsoft Azure platform:
- Windows Azure: It is a Windows - based environment that is used for running applications and storing data on servers in Microsoft's data centers.
- SQL Azure: It is different from Windows Azure in that it provides data services in the cloud based on the SQL servers. SQL Azure is a cloud version of the Microsoft SQL server.
- Windows Azure Platform AppFabric: It provides connectivity to applications on the cloud. AppFabric secures application connectivity and provides federated access control. There are two main components to the AppFabric - Service Bus, which is used to connect cloud and non-cloud apps by providing bidirectional communication even after NAT and firewalls, and Access Control, used to monitor access to services.
Azure is primarily PaaS, where custom applications can be built and deployed on top of the pre-configured virtual machines provided by the Azure platform.
Windows Azure
Windows Azure is the cloud operating system or runtime environment where you can deploy and run your applications. An azure application typically consists of instances of two types of roles:
- Web role: This is the front end of your web app. It includes IIS (Windows Web Server) capabilities and supports ASP.NET.
- Worker Role: This is the backend of your application. It is an executable file with a well defined code entry point. It can also be used to run Apache web server.
For each role, Azure has an agent that monitors the failure conditions of the role and exposes the API. These agents communicate with the Fabric Controller that allocates resources according to configuration file and monitors all running applications.
Windows Azure Storage
Windows Azure Storage is used for scalable storage in the cloud. It provides a storage limit of 100 terabytes per account. It uses auto-scale features to meet massive volume and throughput requirements. There are 4 types of storage- BLOBs, files, tables and queues.
- BLOB Storage: BLOB refers to Binary Large Object, and its size is usually around 1 TB. It is useful for storing unstructured data. Each Azure account has containers, and each of these containers have one or more BLOBs.
- File Storage: This is used for shared storage for applications and VMs.
- Tables: This is used for storing structured data, but it does not follow the relational scheme.
- Queues: Queues are used for messaging in applications. They are asynchronous, and not transactional.
Sunday, 11 September 2016
