Windows Azure

In a small local one, what in the future would be called Startup, began its journey. Storing and sharing the files on a personal computer that served as the central unit.

The exponential growth of the business, propelled the simple file server to become a system room, first, and in a true CPD later. Integrating dozens of teams dedicated to storage, communications and security.

And with this came the Internet.

Renting surplus becomes core business

The business of the now national company, with multiple branches throughout the country, jumped naturally to this new market – and its opportunities –, evolving into a transnational company spread across the globe .

The needs of offering its services to millions of customers every day, increased to a a new level of computing and information transmission requirements in its multiple and increasingly large data centers Occupying large buildings, in various geographical locations, and with facilities built to withstand the most varied natural disasters.

And then someone realized that a very important part, both of the storage and of the computing power, was sitting idle. And it occurred to him that these services could be offered in the form of a pay-per-use subscription.

And thus Cloud Computing was born.

Dividing the Cloud by its characteristics

Cloud Computing is, in short, an old paradigm brought back to our times and reinvented: sharing the resources offered by a powerful central server .

With the difference that the hardware on which the operations are performed has been abstracted, operating in a purely virtual environment. That is to say, the physical capacities of the computers that run our services have lost all importance; it doesn't even matter where they are physically located. The power and storage capacity are virtually infinite, and only depend on the size of our wallet.

But the types of services are so many and so different that a first great division of Cloud Computing has been made:IaaSInfrastructure as a Service. This is the closest way to the physical hardware of the Cloud. Here what we are going to virtualize are the servers – microprocessors, RAM memory, size of hard drives, etc.PaaS Platform as a Service. We abstract the previous layer, and consume services from a pre-established platform – for example, in Azure it is Windows 2012 + SQL 2008 + IIS – on which we mount our developments and products.SaaS Software as a Service. The best known and most used level by the majority of users, where the use of the applications is carried out in a Cloud model. All those of us who have a gmail account, a SkyDrive storage, are owners of a Smartphone, or are subscribed to a Yahoo group, have direct experience of Software as a Service, on a Cloud platform.

Windows Azure Cloud computing from Microsoft

The dean, and company with the most users in the Cloud is Amazon. They made good the saying "whoever hits first, hits two times” and its IaaS offering is, without a doubt, the most used throughout the cybersphere.

Currently its Amazon web services, more focused on PaaS, are what the company is promoting most forcefully, in full combat with Google and Azure, to attract some vitally important players in the future of the market: application programmers

Windows Azure, came later and initially very focused on becoming the standard Platform as a Service for application developers.

Thus, demonstrating incomparable evolution, in just two years it has become the environment that supports more programming languages ​​and technologies: C, VB.NET, F, php, python, java, ruby, etc.

In addition to the fact that it has also entered strongly, in recent months, in various services such as infrastructure, multimedia transmissions, mobile devices, networks and communications, security and identification, or big data.

And of which I will speak in more detail in the next installment of this article, in a few days.

In XatakaWindows | Speaking of Azure