Microsoft Azure
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| Cloud computing | |
| languages | English , Czech , German , Spanish , French , Hungarian , Italian , Japanese , Korean , Dutch , Polish , Portuguese , Russian , Swedish , Turkish , Standard Chinese |
| operator | Microsoft Corporation |
| On-line | February 1, 2010 (currently online) |
| http://azure.microsoft.com/ | |
Microsoft Azure (short: Azure , pronunciation : [ ˈæʒər ]) (previously: Windows Azure) is a cloud computing platform from Microsoft with services such as SQL Azure or AppFabric , which is primarily aimed at software developers . Azure was announced in October 2008, started with the code name "Project Red Dog", since February 1, 2010 the platform is officially available.
Microsoft Azure users use Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Concept and realization
Cloud computing providers provide applications and databases that can be used network-based. The user's own files are also no longer on their own computer, but on the provider's servers . Microsoft would like to concentrate much more on internet-based services and hopes to be able to counter the trend towards buying cheaper and less powerful computers like netbooks . An interesting side effect for the manufacturer would be that the problem of pirated copies would be greatly reduced, since software no longer has to be distributed to end users. The offer is intended to mark a major change in course at Microsoft. It competes against comparable offers such as Google App Engine or the Elastic Compute Cloud from Amazon .
Microsoft Azure represents the major part of a newly developed platform, the Microsoft Azure Platform . This platform offers users new services, such as a database and a new version of the .NET framework . In addition, services for the synchronization of data based on the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services system are offered.
Regions
As of March 2020, Azure is represented in 58 regions and thus 140 countries around the world. A location represents the city or area of the Azure region. Each region is paired with another region within the same geography; this makes them a regional couple. For example, Amsterdam and Dublin are places that form a regional pair. This pairing of regions enables additional reliability in that the partner region automatically takes over in the event of problems in a region (special function of some Azure services and associated with additional costs). With Azure,
Microsoft is the first cloud service provider to commit to building facilities on the African continent, with two regions in South Africa.
Germany
As part of a data trust structure , a special cloud solution is offered for Germany, which is supposed to meet the stronger need for data protection in Germany. A German data trustee , here T-Systems , controls access to customer data. In November 2015, Microsoft announced that it would install two data centers in Germany for this purpose. Locations are Frankfurt am Main and Magdeburg . This means that customer data is not distributed in data centers outside Germany. The German data centers are part of a global cloud infrastructure that includes 54 regions in over 140 countries. On August 31, 2018, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Cloud Germany is no longer available for new customers and that no new services will be provided.
Since the end of 2019, two new data centers have been available in Berlin and Frankfurt (Hattersheim), on which Azure, Office365 and, in the future, Dynamics365 are available.
Switzerland
In 2019 Microsoft planned two data centers in the cantons of Geneva and Zurich. The federal laws and regulations are to be complied with. Microsoft names the finance and health sector, the public sector and non-governmental organizations as target groups. The establishment of the data center was initiated by a large anchor tenant . The major Swiss bank UBS has announced that it would like to outsource a third of your data to the cloud in cooperation with Microsoft in the medium term. Swisscom is a sales partner of Azure.
construction
Microsoft Azure is divided into Compute , Storage , Virtual Network , CDN and Marketplace .
- Compute provides three so-called roles: Web Role as a container for web applications, Worker Role for, among other things, concurrent or computationally intensive tasks and the VM Role (beta), which hosts “user-provided Windows Server 2008 R2 image [s]” in the cloud .
- Storage allows data to be saved in BLOBs , tables or queues and
- AppFabric provides infrastructure services such as a service bus , access control , caching , integration and composite app for distributed applications.
With the VM Role , Microsoft enables its own Windows server images to run in its data centers and thus to run previous on-premise solutions in the cloud. However, one is committed to this one operating system. The Web Role allows applications in a variety of programming languages (.NET (C # and Visual Basic), C ++, PHP, Ruby, Python, Java) provide . The Microsoft Azure platform is especially tailored to the .NET Framework and Visual Studio . There is an Eclipse integration, but it can only be used under Windows.
Microsoft also offers its infrastructure as an appliance to set up a private Azure cloud in its own data center.
Azure supports most programming languages and has a role system. However, in order to deploy a Java web application, you cannot simply upload a WAR file , you have to package and deploy your own application, including the Java runtime environment and Tomcat application server, in a worker role .
development
Ray Ozzie officially announced Windows Azure for the first time at the Professional Developers Conference 2008 in Los Angeles and provided conference attendees with access to a Community Technology Preview . It was previously announced by Steve Ballmer as Windows Cloud .
The platform has been officially available since February 1, 2010. Other software manufacturers are thus able to offer their software as a SaaS service via the platform .
Microsoft has gradually expanded the functionality of the Azure platform since it was first presented in autumn 2008. The following overview provides information about major extensions to the platform as well as important announcements about Microsoft Azure. The usability of the cloud was constantly changing. There were problems with not being in competition with one's own work.
| time | Extensions |
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| October 2008 |
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| March 2009 |
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| November 2009 |
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| June 2010 |
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| November 2010 |
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| April 2014 |
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| July 2014 |
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| September 2015 |
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| December 2015 |
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| March 2016 |
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| September 2017 |
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| July 2018 |
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| September 2018 |
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| April 2019 |
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services
Azure provides a large number of services, which are listed and described on the Azure website. There is also a marketplace through which third-party services can be provided and used. The services can be set up and managed via a portal as well as PowerShell scripts.
privacy
Microsoft has stated that under the USA Patriot Act, the US government could have access to the data even if the hosted company is not American and the data is outside of the United States. However, Microsoft Azure is compliant with the EU data protection directive (95/46 / EC). To address privacy and security concerns, Microsoft has set up what is known as a Microsoft Azure Trust Center, and Microsoft Azure has several services that are compliant with various compliance programs such as ISO 27001: 2005 and HIPAA.
Resilience
According to Microsoft, the data can be stored redundantly on different servers. An availability of 99.9% (this availability class 3 arithmetically corresponds to an annual downtime of 8:46 hours, see high availability ) for the compute area of Microsoft Azure is guaranteed if at least two instances of each role are simultaneously in different error and upgrade Areas run in order to have a second instance as a fallback option in the event of an instance failure.
An availability of 99.9% is also guaranteed for the storage area of Microsoft Azure if the requests for adding, editing, reading or deleting the data are correctly formulated.
The following is a list of relevant failures and service interruptions of Microsoft Azure:
| date | description |
|---|---|
| February 29, 2012 | Failure of various services due to a leap day software error. |
| July 26, 2012 | In Western Europe, Microsoft's Azure cloud service was down for two and a half hours. |
| February 22, 2013 | An expired SSL certificate leads to failures. |
| October 30, 2013 | Worldwide outage of the compute service. |
| August 18 and 19, 2014 | Worldwide failure of various Azure services for several hours. |
| 18th November 2014 | An upgrade of the storage service leads to reduced capacities in different regions. |
| 3rd December 2015 | Active Directory failures . |
| 15th September 2016 | Worldwide failure of the DNS service. |
| 15th March 2017 | Storage service problems. |
| 29th September 2017 | Azure customers in Northern Europe had limited access to Microsoft's business cloud for more than seven hours. The cause of the failure was an error in maintenance work. |
| 3rd October 2017 | Failure caused by a fire extinguishing system. |
| 20th June 2018 | Faults in the cooling system lead to failures. |
| 4th September 2018 | Failure of the cooling system leads to failures in several regions for a duration of over 25 hours. |
| 29 January 2019 | Occurrence of an incident with data loss for a number of Azure customers who had used the Azure SQL Database product with transparent data encryption (TDE). |
| 2nd May 2019 | DNS migration problems. |
| March 2020 | Massive capacity bottlenecks as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic |
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Why is there a 'reddog' DNS suffix for my VM's? In: cloudelicious. April 4, 2018, Retrieved April 2, 2020 (American English).
- ^ Windows Azure Platform Now Generally Available in 21 Countries. (No longer available online.) Microsoft February 1, 2010, archived from the original on October 29, 2010 ; accessed on May 9, 2010 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ The cloud window. In: DerWesten. Kunke Medien NRW, November 1, 2008, accessed on December 11, 2016 .
- ↑ a b Microsoft introduces Windows Azure. ZDnet.de, August 27, 2008, accessed April 15, 2009 .
- ↑ Azure Regions | Microsoft Azure. Retrieved April 2, 2020 .
- ^ Microsoft beats Google and Amazon to announce the first African data centers, kicking off in 2018. In: VentureBeat. Retrieved May 18, 2017, April 2, 2020 (American English).
- ↑ Björn Greif: Microsoft announces cloud services from German data centers. In: zdnet.de. November 11, 2015, accessed November 17, 2016 .
- ↑ Azure regions. Microsoft, accessed April 21, 2019 .
- ↑ Markus Nitschke: Microsoft will provide its cloud services from new data centers in Germany from 2019 and is thus reacting to changing customer requirements. In: microsoft.com (Newsroom Microsoft Germany). August 31, 2018, accessed August 31, 2018 .
- ↑ microsoft.com: Microsoft will provide its cloud services from new data centers in Germany from 2019 and thus react to changing customer requirements
- ↑ http://www.netzwoche.ch/news/2018-03-14/microsoft-will-mit-schweizer-cloud-services-antreten
- ↑ Patrick Lüthi: Microsoft Azure Datacenter Switzerland: Relevant information for SMEs. In: Ventoo Blog. Ventoo AG, June 28, 2019, accessed on August 12, 2019 .
- ↑ Marc Bodenmann, André Ruch, Daniel Daesler: FOKUS: Cloud providers vying for Swiss banks - TV. In: 10vor10. Swiss Radio and Television (SRF), July 19, 2019, accessed on August 12, 2019 .
- ↑ Armin Schädeli: The cloud is evolving: Swisscom and Microsoft Switzerland are deepening their partnership in the Azure area. In: swisscom.ch. August 28, 2019, accessed October 2, 2019 .
- ↑ a b D. Chappell. Introducing the Windows Azure Platform. 2010-10, http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/Whitepapers/introducingwindowsazureplatform/default.aspx Accessed June 2, 2011.
- ^ Windows Azure Platform and Interoperability. Microsoft, archived from the original on November 21, 2009 ; accessed on June 2, 2011 .
- ↑ B. Lobaugh: Deploying a Java application to Windows Azure with Command-line Ant. (Not available online.) In: Microsoft Platform & Java. Microsoft, December 14, 2011; archived from the original on April 25, 2017 ; accessed on December 11, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Windows Azure Pack. Microsoft, accessed December 11, 2016 .
- ↑ Cesar de la Torre: Developing and Deploying Java-Tomcat apps into Windows Azure. Microsoft, September 12, 2010, accessed December 11, 2016 .
- ↑ runtime software customer story: More sales and lower costs in fashion sales with Windows Azure. (PDF; 1.1 MB) runtime.de, August 10, 2011, accessed on August 10, 2011 .
- ↑ Upcoming Name Change for Windows Azure. Microsoft Azure, March 24, 2014; accessed December 7, 2019 .
- ↑ Microsoft Azure Machine Learning combines power of comprehensive machine learning with benefits of cloud. June 16, 2014, accessed December 7, 2019 .
- ↑ Microsoft demonstrates its Linux-based Azure Cloud Switch operating system. September 18, 2015, accessed December 7, 2019 .
- ↑ Announcing Azure Portal general availability. December 2, 2015, accessed December 7, 2019 .
- ↑ Azure Service Fabric is GA! Microsoft, March 31, 2016, accessed December 7, 2019 .
- ^ Microsoft Azure gets a new Logo and a Manifesto. September 26, 2017, accessed December 7, 2019 .
- ↑ Azure Service Fabric is now in public preview. Microsoft, July 16, 2018, accessed December 6, 2019 .
- ↑ Azure IoT Central is now available. Microsoft, September 24, 2018, accessed December 7, 2019 .
- ↑ Azure Front Door Service is now available. April 17, 2019, accessed December 7, 2019 .
- ↑ Azure products. Microsoft, accessed December 11, 2016 (Overview of available Azure services).
- ↑ Azure Marketplace. Microsoft, accessed December 11, 2016 .
- ↑ EU data privacy authorities approve Microsoft Azure, Office 365 cloud services. Retrieved April 2, 2020 .
- ↑ Trust your cloud | Microsoft Azure. Retrieved April 2, 2020 .
- ↑ Managing compliance in the cloud. Retrieved April 2, 2020 (American English).
- ↑ a b Service level agreements (SLAs). Microsoft, accessed December 11, 2016 .
- ↑ Improving Application Availability in Windows Azure. Microsoft, archived from the original on November 15, 2010 ; Retrieved June 22, 2011 .
- ↑ Summary of Windows Azure Service Disruption on Feb 29th, 2012 . Azure.microsoft.com. March 9, 2012. Retrieved July 12, 2017.
- ↑ Henning Behme: Cloud: Windows Azure glitch fixed. In: Heise Online. July 28, 2012, accessed December 11, 2016 .
- ^ Bryan Bishop: Xbox Live and Windows Azure suffering from extended outages . Retrieved June 27, 2013.
- ↑ Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud hit by worldwide management interuption [sic ] . October 31, 2013. Retrieved November 3, 2013.
- ↑ Microsoft Azure down for several hours worldwide . zdnet.de. Retrieved October 16, 2018.
- ^ Jason Zander: Update on Azure Storage Service Interruption . Microsoft. Retrieved December 5, 2014.
- ^ Mary J. Foley: Microsoft says Storage service performance update brought Azure down . Retrieved December 5, 2014.
- ↑ European Office 365 and Microsoft Azure users hit by service outage . Retrieved September 6, 2018.
- ^ Mary Jo Foley: Global DNS outage hits Microsoft Azure customers - ZDNet . Retrieved September 6, 2018.
- ↑ Microsoft confirms Azure storage issues around the world (updated) . March 16, 2017. Retrieved September 6, 2018.
- ↑ Microsoft Cloud - Azure is struggling with long outages . commagazin.de. Retrieved October 16, 2018.
- ↑ Microsoft Says Azure Outage Caused by Accidental Fire-Suppression Gas Release . October 4, 2017. Retrieved September 10, 2018.
- ↑ Microsoft Azure suffers major outage . Retrieved September 6, 2018.
- ^ Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft South Central US datacenter outage takes down a number of cloud services - ZDNet . Retrieved September 6, 2018.
- ↑ Microsoft accidentally deletes customer DBs . The Register. January 30, 2019. Retrieved February 1, 2019.
- ↑ Chris Pietschmann: May 2, 2019: Major Azure Outage Due to DNS Migration Issue . Retrieved May 3, 2019.
- ↑ Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor 29 Mar 2020 at 03:15 am: Microsoft cops to 775% Azure surge, quotas on resources and 'significant new capacity' coming ASAP. Retrieved April 2, 2020 .
