Treating computing power as a utility service

In traditional on-premises or managed-hosting solutions, you either rent or own the infrastructure that your service is hosted on. You�re paying for future capacity that you�re currently not using. The Windows Azure platform, like other cloud platforms, follows a model of utility computing.

Utility computing treats computing power or storage in the same way you treat a utility service (such as gas or electricity). Your usage of the Windows Azure platform is metered, and you pay only for what you consume.


PAY AS YOU GROW
If you have to pay only for the resources you use, you can launch a scalable service without making a huge investment up front in hardware. In the early days of a new venture, a start-up company survives from investment funding and generates very little income. The less money the company spends, the more chance it has of surviving long enough to generate sufficient income to sustain itself. If the service is successful, then the generated income will pay for the use of the resources.

It�s not unusual for technology start-ups to purchase large and expensive hardware solutions for new ventures to cope with predicted future demand. If the service is successful, then it�ll require the extra capacity; in the meantime, the start-up is paying for resources that it�s not using. Utility computing offers the best of both worlds, giving you the ability to use extra capacity as the service grows without making up-front investments in hardware, and to pay only for the resources that that you use.


SCALE ON DEMAND
Some situations involve large, unpredictable growth; you want to handle the load, but not pay for the unused capacity. This situation might appear in the following scenarios:

� Viral marketing campaigns
� Referrals by a popular website
� Concert ticket sales

Let�s say you run a Hawaiian Shirt Shop, and you typically have a predictable pattern of usage. If, for example, Ashton Kutcher (who has 2,000,000 Twitter followers) tweets that he buys his shirts from your website, and he posts a link to your site to all his followers, it�s likely that your website will experience a surge in traffic.

An example shows that your website normally receives around 1,000 hits per day. After Ashton Kutcher tweeted about your website, that increased to 100,000 hits per day. The traffic dropped off after about a week, and then the website had a new baseline of around 10,000 hits per day.

With Windows Azure, you can dynamically scale up to handle the increased traffic load for that week (and get all the extra shirt sales); then, as the traffic decreases, you can scale back down again, paying only for the resources you use. Scaling up and down in Azure is quite simple. You have several options at your disposal. It�s important to remember that Azure doesn�t scale your service for you. Because it costs money, you have to tell Azure how many servers you want. Azure gives you tools to do this. You can simply log into the portal and make a small change to a configuration file, which is the easy, manual way. You can also use the Service Management API. This API lets you change the resources you have allocated to your application in an automated way.

It�s not only possible to scale up and down for predictable (or unpredictable) bursts of growth; you can also dynamically scale your service based on normal, varied usage patterns.


VARIED USAGE PATTERNS
Returning to the Hawaiian Shirt Shop example: after the Ashton Kutcher hype died down a little, your website leveled off at around 10,000 hits per day. Most of the time there�s little traffic on the site, apart from during lunch and in the evening. Evidently, most people don�t buy Hawaiian shirts when they�re at work.

Because it takes only a few minutes to provision a new web server in Windows Azure, you can dynamically scale your website as your usage patterns dictate. For the Hawaiian Shirt Shop, you might decide to run one instance of the website during the day, but in the evening to run three instances to deal with the increased traffic.

This sort of scenario is a perfect example of when cloud computing, specifically using Windows Azure, is a perfect fit for your business. If you need to scale beyond a single web server for certain periods of the day when traffic is high, Windows Azure is a cost-effective choice because it allows you to scale back when traffic dies down. Cloud computing solutions are the only offerings that give you this elastic scalability. Other solutions typically require you to over-provision your hardware to cope with the peak periods, but that hardware is underused at off-peak times. So far, we�ve discussed the cost savings you can achieve by scaling your application up and down. Let�s now look at how you can save money in maintenance costs.


Simplified data-center management
We�ll look at how the effort involved in operationally maintaining your application is reduced in the Windows Azure environment.

BUILT-IN FAULT TOLERANCE
In Windows Azure, if the physical hardware that your service instance resides on fails, that failed instance is redeployed to another machine. Hardware maintenance resides solely in Microsoft�s domain, and you don�t have to worry about it.

When you have more than two instances of your application running in Windows Azure, each instance of your web role doesn�t live on the same physical server as another instance. This arrangement ensures that if the hardware for one instance dies, the other instance can continue to perform incoming requests. Not only does the second instance live on a different physical server, but it also lives on a different rack (in case the server rack fails). The server rack where the second instance resides is connected to a different network and power grid from the first rack. This level of fault tolerance ensures that if there�s a failure on the physical server, the server rack, the network, or in the electricity supply, your service continues to run and is able to service requests.

When you install your application, Windows Azure decides what servers to place your instances on, with the intention of providing the maximum levels of fault tolerance. Because all data-center assets are tracked and mapped, the placement of applications on each physical server is determined by an algorithm designed to match the fault-tolerance criteria. Even with only two instances of an application, these considerations are pretty complex, but Windows Azure maximizes fault tolerance even when there are hundreds of instances.

Although fault tolerance is maintained within a physical data center, Azure doesn�t currently run across the data centers, but runs only within a single data center. You still need to perform offsite backups (if you need them). You can replicate your data to a second data center and run your applications in more than one data center if georedundancy is required.

One of the key differences between Windows Azure�hosted applications and regular on-premises solutions or other cloud solutions is that Windows Azure abstracts away everything about the infrastructure, including the underlying operating system, leaving you to focus on your application. Let�s see how Azure�s ability to maintain the servers your applications run on reduces cost.


SERVER SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE BEGONE!
Whether you�re running an entire data center or hosting a website on a dedicated server at a hosting company, maintaining the operating system is usually your responsibility. Maintenance tasks can include managing antivirus protection, installing Windows updates, applying service packs, and providing security. If you�re running your own dedicated machine on your own premises rather than it being hosted for you, then you�re even responsible for performing backups.

In Windows Azure, because the tasks associated with maintaining the server are the responsibility of Microsoft, you can focus completely on your application. This situation greatly simplifies and reduces the cost of running a service.

A final cost consideration is that if you have a service hosted in Windows Azure, you don�t have to worry about the licensing costs for the underlying operating system. You gain all the benefits of running under the latest version of Windows without paying for the costs of maintaining that software. The underlying software is abstracted away from your service, but the base underlying operating system of your service is Windows Server 2008. If you�re running multiple servers, the cost of licensing usually runs into thousands of dollars.

Although you don�t have to worry about hardware or software maintenance from an operational or cost perspective, you do have to worry about it from a software design perspective.


DESIGNING FOR DISTRIBUTION
Your services won�t always be running on the same machine, and they might be failed over to another machine at any time. Failover might be caused by hardware failures, software maintenance cycles, or load distribution. You must design your software so that it can handle these failures. This might mean automatically retrying a failed operation when an exception occurs or reloading any local caches when a service restarts.

Source of Information : Manning Azure in Action 2010