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Microsoft Azure Essentials: Azure Web Apps for Developers
By Rick Rainey
The “Microsoft Azure Essentials” series helps you advance your technical skills with Microsoft Azure. “Microsoft Azure Essentials: Azure Web Apps for Developers” focuses on providing essential information about developing web applications hosted on Azure Web Apps. It is written with the developer who has experience using Visual Studio and the .NET Framework in mind. If Azure Web Apps is new to you, this book is for you. If you have experience developing for Azure Web Apps, this book is for you, too, because there are features and tools discussed in this text that are new to the platform.
The Cloud for Productivity and Mobility Ebook is a guide for small and midsize businesses. As mobile work becomes the norm, turn to cloud-based solutions to extend productivity, collaboration, and business management tools to employees on the go.
Mobile means business. During the past decade, mobile devices have become ubiquitous in our lives, performing a range of activities that were formerly limited to desktop and laptop computers. Now, mobility is an essential tool for startups and smaller businesses to empower workers and connect with customers.
The ABCs of cloud security
By Thomas Hansen, Vice President of Worldwide SMB, Microsoft
Small businesses are adopting cloud services at a rapid pace – be it for payroll, accounting, work from anywhere, collaboration, storage or email needs. And it’s understandable that many still have questions about how safe the cloud is or how cloud providers actually take care of their data. However, the cloud is actually the single safest places for small businesses to keep their sensitive data.
Some may think this is a bold statement, but the reality is small businesses might find themselves at greater risk if they run their businesses on outdated technology or keep all their sensitive information in a server in the back room or in a laptop. And with Windows 10 on the horizon, we’re actively addressing modern security threats with advancements to strengthen identity protection, information protection and threat resistance.
No doubt cloud security is a huge topic. For this post, I’d like to focus on three things that help keep your data secure.
A is for Access
In one sense, security is simple: it’s about controlling access.
You want to provide your employees, partners and other authorized parties access to the files they need, while ensuring that unauthorized parties can’t get to them. And just because your business may be classified as small, it doesn’t mean it’s not a target for hackers. In fact, some smaller companies are actually more vulnerable to attack because criminals know these businesses don’t take substantial preventative measures. One of the benefits of working with vendors like Microsoft is that we invest in security and take preventative measures, so you don’t have to worry about it. Dedicated teams track how security threats and attacks change over time, so we can evolve our approach too.
For example, when data moves from your computer into the Microsoft cloud, it’s encrypted. This means that even if it was somehow intercepted, it can’t be accessed by anyone who doesn’t also have the encryption key specific to that file.
We put these processes in place so you don’t have to worry about the security of your data. Instead, you can focus on tasks more critical to the success of your business.
Once your file arrives on the cloud drive, it’s stored on one of thousands of servers in a secure, state-of-the-art facility. The only people who have physical access to the servers holding your data are those doing occasional maintenance on them — and they have no way of knowing whose data is on which disk. This actually provides a huge security advantage over hosting your data on on-premises servers, which are probably exposed to hundreds of people on a monthly basis – your employees, visitors to your office, etc.
B is for Better (Encryption)
Encryption is just one of the ways we make life tough for malicious hackers. Just as the military constantly hones its skills through drilling and training, we’re constantly testing and updating our protections. We maintain a “blue team” dedicated to continually improving the security of our products and services. And to make sure those defenses are up to standard, we employ a ”red team” of hired hackers who use the latest techniques to try and penetrate our cloud environments. When a potential security issue is spotted, the blue team moves to resolve it as quickly as possible, so attackers don’t have a chance to exploit it.
We put these processes in place so you don’t have to worry about the security of your data. Instead, you can focus on tasks more critical to the success of your business.
C is for Control
C could also be for “Customer,” because the truth is that security begins with you and your employees. As a cloud provider, there are many things we have control over that help keep your data safe. But there are many things that only you have control over, and a secure cloud environment depends on small businesses using best practices for security with their employees and vendors. For example:
•Use strong passwords, change them often, and use unique passwords for different applications. This way, in the event that one account gets compromised, your other applications are safe. Also, with new Windows 10 feature Windows Hello, we’re taking control and security one step farther by allowing instant access to your devices through biometric authentication – using your face, iris or fingerprint to unlock your devices.
•Make sure that your file permissions are set up so that the right people see the right data, require strong passwords within your organization and vet your employees and partners for any potential security concerns.
In addition, when you move your business to a Microsoft cloud solution, you control who in your organization can access data, right down to the file level. We enable automatic data loss prevention services that make sure your employees are in compliance with your organization’s privacy policies before they send files out, but control over which files they can see in the first place is in your hands.
The cloud introduced a new era in IT security, where all of us – from technology providers and policy makers to business owners and employees – have a role to play. I encourage you to take advantage of everything the cloud has to offer your business and to make smart choices to protect your business.
The cloud isn’t some nebulous construct that floats above us in the sky and magically stores and disseminates information. It’s actually a mind-boggling number of hard drives collected in datacenters located all over the world, connected by miles and miles of cable, so we can store enormous amounts of information and communicate almost instantaneously across the globe. You and everyone who uses the Internet to send an email, update a social media site, or host a sound file uses these datacenters. How much do you know about them?
What is Cloud Computing?
"Cloud Computing", by definition, refers to the on-demand delivery of IT resources and applications via the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.
The Basics
Whether you are running applications that share photos to millions of mobile users or you’re supporting the critical operations of your business, the “cloud” provides rapid access to flexible and low cost IT resources. With cloud computing, you don’t need to make large upfront investments in hardware and spend a lot of time on the heavy lifting of managing that hardware. Instead, you can provision exactly the right type and size of computing resources you need to power your newest bright idea or operate your IT department. You can access as many resources as you need, almost instantly, and only pay for what you use.
How Does it Work?
Cloud Computing provides a simple way to access servers, storage, databases and a broad set of application services over the Internet. Cloud Computing providers such as Amazon Web Services own and maintain the network-connected hardware required for these application services, while you provision and use what you need via a web application.
Six Advantages and Benefits of Cloud Computing
Trade capital expense for variable expense - Instead of having to invest heavily in data centers and servers before you know how you’re going to use them, you can only pay when you consume computing resources, and only pay for how much you consume.
Benefit from massive economies of scale icon - Benefit from massive economies of scale - By using cloud computing, you can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own. Because usage from hundreds of thousands of customers are aggregated in the cloud, providers such as Amazon Web Services can achieve higher economies of scale which translates into lower pay as you go prices.
Stop guessing capacity - Eliminate guessing on your infrastructure capacity needs. When you make a capacity decision prior to deploying an application, you often either end up sitting on expensive idle resources or dealing with limited capacity. With Cloud Computing, these problems go away. You can access as much or as little as you need, and scale up and down as required with only a few minutes notice.
Increase speed and agility - In a cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only ever a click away, which means you reduce the time it takes to make those resources available to your developers from weeks to just minutes. This results in a dramatic increase in agility for the organization, since the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is significantly lower.
Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers icon - Focus on projects that differentiate your business, not the infrastructure. Cloud computing lets you focus on your own customers, rather than on the heavy lifting of racking, stacking and powering servers.
Go global in minutes - Easily deploy your application in multiple regions around the world with just a few clicks. This means you can provide a lower latency and better experience for your customers simply and at minimal cost.
Types of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing has three main types that are commonly referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Selecting the right type of cloud computing for your needs can help you strike the right balance of control and the avoidance of undifferentiated heavy lifting.
Building End to End Video Workflows in the Cloud by Peter Walsted, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Azure Media Services
Imagine building an end to end live video workflow where all components would exist in Azure?
In today’s live video world, you are dependent on heavy investments in on-premises hardware to support your encoding efforts and your constant struggle with operational issues. Can this be simplified by allowing you to plug your existing live stream into an endpoint and you are ready to go? Yes, that is now a reality with Azure Media Services, as we are releasing a public preview of Live Encoding. By leveraging the power and scalability of Azure, you are now able to build end to end video workflows that runs truly in the cloud.
This public preview of Live Encoding for Azure Media Services leverages the same live encoding technologies used to power digital coverage of some of the largest events on the planet, such as Super Bowl XLIX and the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.
What does it do?
Live Encoding for Azure Media Services expands on the industry-proven live cloud platform. It can be combined with dynamic packaging, dynamic encryption, sub-clipping, dynamic manifest manipulation, ad-marker insertion, and near-seamless live/on-demand capabilities to build comprehensive live and cloud DVR workflows.
Common use cases include event-based streaming with dynamic ad insertion, plus 24/7 streaming with cloud DVR requirements.
Features include:
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Live encoding of a single bitrate live feed into an adaptive bitrate stream
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Ability to ingest a live feed over RTP protocol (MPEG transport streams), RTMP, and Smooth Streaming
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Ability to control insertion of slates and to signal ad insertions to the client
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Thumbnail previews of the live feed
Cloud Computing, Server Utilization, & the Environment by Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services
After reading the Greenpeace, Renewable Energy, and Data Centers blog entry from my colleague James Hamilton a couple of weeks back, I took a look at the Greenpeace report on data center power consumption and noted that it’s pretty unusual for an environmental report to not feature energy conservation as a primary evaluation criteria.
It seems to me that any analysis of the climate impact of a data center should take into consideration resource utilization and energy efficiency, in addition to power mix. Carbon emissions are driven by three items: the number of servers running, the total energy required to power each server, and the carbon intensity of energy sources used to power these servers. Using fewer servers and powering them more efficiently are at least as important to reducing the carbon impact of a company’s data center as its power mix. I thought it would be interesting to run the numbers on this and take a look at how these three factors interact when it comes to overall carbon emissions from compute activity.
I’ll get to the math in a minute but what I ended up with is the following:
On average, AWS customers use 77% fewer servers, 84% less power, and utilize a 28% cleaner power mix, for a total reduction in carbon emissions of 88% from using the AWS Cloud instead of operating their own data centers.
Let’s take a closer look at these numbers to get a better sense of the efficiency and power conservation gains that are possible through cloud computing.
Cloud Customers Consume 77% Fewer Servers
Let’s first look at server utilization and the number of servers required to support a given group of workloads. On-premises data centers typically have fairly low server utilization rates. This is because companies can’t afford to run out of server capacity. Without sufficient capacity, applications fail, sales don’t get completed, customers don’t get served, and critical business data doesn’t get tracked. Servers and related IT resources are required for the company to maintain high service quality through peak load periods.
This peak capacity is only rarely used and, consequently, average server utilization levels are often under 20%. In contrast, large-scale cloud infrastructure operators have a much larger pool of customers and applications allowing them to smooth out peaks and run at much higher overall utilization levels. In addition, innovations that are made possible by the scale and dynamic nature of the cloud, such as the EC2 Spot Market, help to drive utilization even higher and lead to additional efficiency improvements.
The 2014 Data Center Efficiency Assessment from the NRDC has cloud server utilization at 65% and on-premises utilization running 12 to 18%, which is consistent with other estimates I’ve come across over the years. So, with approximately 65% server utilization rates for the typical large-scale cloud provider versus 15% on-premises, it means that when companies move to the cloud, their applications can be supported using only 23% of the server resources, so this means they typically provision fewer than 1/4 of the servers that they would on-premises. This alone is a material gain — but there are significant power efficiency differences as well!
Cloud Customers Consume 84% Less Power
A common measure of infrastructure efficiency is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). This is the total power that is delivered to the server, storage, and networking in a data center (this is called critical power), divided by the total power that is brought to a data center (this is called total power). The difference between total power and critical power is the power lost in data center power distribution, cooling and, to a lesser extent, lighting and other power-consuming overhead items. Lower is better when looking at PUE.
The annual Uptime Institute survey has found average data center PUE to be 1.7 (Industry Average Data Center PUE Stays Nearly Flat Over Four Years). Large-scale cloud providers run at scale and invest deeply in efficiency since, at scale, these investments can have real and rapid paybacks. Some megascale operators report PUE numbers as low as 1.07. Google reports an impressive PUE of 1.12. Some of the smaller cloud providers may invest less in efficiency improvements so I’ll use a more conservative 1.2 as the cloud industry average PUE, with the understanding that some operators including AWS do run more efficiently.
Using this data, we have a prospective customer moving from on-premises to a cloud deployment going from an average PUE of 1.7 down to 1.2, which means, for like-powered servers, the power consumption in the cloud would be 29% lower than on-premises data centers.
So, if you multiply the impact – 77% fewer servers required (i.e. cloud requires only 23% of the number of servers required for the same workloads) by 71% more efficient servers, customers only need 16% (23% x 71%) of the power as compared to on-premises infrastructure. This represents an 84% reduction in the amount of power required.
To put this into perspective, National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimates that total US data center power consumption was 91 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) in 2013. If all of the workloads in these data centers were migrated to the cloud, we would see a reduction in annual power consumption of more than 76 billion kWh. That would be equivalent to the combined annual residential power consumption of the states of New York and Kentucky.
Cloud Customers Reduce Their Carbon Emissions by 88%
The massive improvement in energy efficiency drives a huge reduction in climate impact because less energy consumed means fewer carbon emissions. The climate impact improvements get even better when you factor in that the average corporate data center has a dirtier power mix than the typical large-scale cloud provider.
A popular way to look at the climate impact of power mix is carbon intensity (grams of carbon emissions per kWh of energy used). Using data from the International Energy Agency report Key World Energy Statistics 2014, the global power source average is 545 grams kWh.
As a cloud example, the June 2015 AWS average power mix carbon intensity is 393 grams/kWh. Measured this way, large-scale cloud providers use a power mix that is 28% less carbon intense than the global average.
Combining the fraction of energy required (16%) with the fraction of carbon intensity of power mix (72%), you end up with only 12% of the carbon emissions. This represents an 88% reduction in carbon emissions for customers when they use AWS vs. the typical on-premises data center.
To show just how large of an impact energy efficiency plays here versus power mix, let’s take a look at how carbon emissions change if we adjust the power mix. This would never happen, but cloud providers could have a power mix that encompassed 6 times the carbon of on-premises datacenters and still achieve the same net carbon impact of on-premises data centers. That’s how much more energy efficient cloud computing is than on-premises datacenters given the factors mentioned above!
Working Toward 100%
AWS remains focused on working towards our long-term commitment to 100% renewable energy usage. In the last year, we’ve taken several significant steps to achieve this goal, including teaming with Pattern Development to build and operate the 150 megawatt Amazon Wind Farm (Fowler Ridge) in Indiana.
In May 2015, we updated our Sustainable Energy webpage to announce that the AWS global infrastructure is powered by approximately 25% renewable energy today, and that we expect to reach 40% by the end of 2016. We have several additional developments planned in the next 12 -18 months to help us get there and encourage our customers to check back on our sustainability page often to watch our progress.
The environmental argument for cloud computing is already surprisingly strong and I expect that the overall equation will just continue to improve going forward.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/cloud-computing-server-utilization-the-environment/
