Microsoft is Building Many Updates in Azure to Compete with Competitors

In April first week, Microsoft tried to close the gap between IT and other platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. With the refined pricing, free SSL support, global DNS load balancing and the introduction of Java support, Azure websites appears to be storing competitor for Heroku, Google App Engine (GAE), OpenShift Online (OS), CloudBees (CB) and Engine Yard (EY).

The recent updates includes the following –

• Web Sites: SSL included, Traffic Manager, Java Support, and Basic Tier. This comprises one aspect of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings for the Windows Azure Platform.
• Virtual Machines: Support for Chef and Puppet extensions, Basic Pricing tier for Compute Instances.
• Virtual Network: General Availability of Dynamic Routing VPN Gateways and Point-to-Site VPN.
• Mobile Services: Preview of Visual Studio support for .NET, Azure Active Directory integration and Offline support;
• Notification Hubs: Support for Kindle Fire devices and Visual Studio Server Explorer integration.
• Autoscale: General Availability release.
• Storage: General Availability release of Read Access Geo Redundant Storage.
• Active Directory Premium: General Availability release.
• Scheduler service: General Availability release.
• Automation: Preview release of new Azure Automation service.
  

With this long-drawn-out updates and features that Azure is offering and a price that matches certain Amazon amenities, Microsoft hopes that they can refurbish Windows Azure platform completely to attract some businesses away from this market leader called Amazon. Where every company is moving towards cloud storage and cloud computing, Amazon being the leader generally doesn’t bother to knock down their competitors and here Microsoft are playing smart with Azure and offering a slashed price offers which is one of the biggest advantage of Amazon. So, is Microsoft are trying to give competition to their competitors like Amazon?

Now this platform (Azure) will offer service-level agreements which is guaranteed for 99.95% up-time and 24/7 support. The servers are also getting an enhancement and one can have as much as 56 GBs of memory. With this enhanced offering, Microsoft is trying to match Amazon’s prices on its most popular services, leading to price cuts of 21% to 33%. And with this move it can take away one of the Amazon’s biggest advantages. Microsoft’s cloud platform has already attracted corporate partners like BMW Latin America, Herbalife, and the IT heavyweight Harris etc. and with the lower price point for certain services could help Microsoft entice a larger variety of partners to this platform. But what if there are some issues which Microsoft always now and then. When Azure was launched although it was a great idea but then later this pay-for-structure was under some toss. But with these updates the Azure seems quite promising to the organizations and partners.

Other than Amazon, Google Compute Engine. Many developers have claimed that Google have better impact on market when it comes to cloud. The another issue is whether Amazon, which is by all accounts the world’s largest public cloud provider, can maintain the advantages of being the pioneer to market with its gigantic cloud and whether it can entice enterprise accounts with higher-end services e.g. RedShift data warehousing. At the end, we just want to know; how are you using these cloud computing in your association? And the offer given by Microsoft attracts you? Comment below your thoughts about it.

Omnie Solutions is an enterprise application development company providing custom web and enterprise mobile application development services to global business. Omnie Solutions has extensive experience and expertise in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 to build enterprise solutions. Follow Omnie Solutions on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.