The ABCs of Azure Development and How to Find the Right Partners

Microsoft Azure is constantly evolving and growing every day. The platform now has over 70 different services that are accompanied by a mountain of amazing features.

According to Microsoft, 95% of Fortune 500 companies have recognized the value that Azure brings to their business. Audi, Carlsberg, Rackspace, Orica - these are just a few names that got charmed by the advanced benefits of this platform.

However, Azure is not meant only for Fortune 500 companies. Growing firms especially enjoy the scalability, flexibility, and utilities Azure has to offer to maximize the efficiency of day-to-day activities. Regardless of where you are in your growth as a business, Microsoft Azure has multiple ‘win now and stay in good shape for later’ solutions to offer that will make your life much easier while you work on maintaining and even improving your organizational effectiveness.

In short, over the years, Microsoft Azure has transformed into an amazing solution that has something to offer to literally every customer, regardless of its business needs.

As you recall if you have been actively reading our blog, we have already covered all the essentials about Microsoft Azure in one of our previous articles. We even wrote an entire blog post dedicated to how this particular cloud computing platform compares to giants like AWS.

Since you, as our regular reader, are now familiar with the benefits that come with cloud computing and why this platform is a great solution for both big and small businesses, we believe it is time to take things even further and discuss how to actually make use of the amazing features Azure has to offer.

Why is Azure So Popular

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Creating new apps, hosting websites, keeping data in check - these are a few popular reasons why various businesses opt for Microsoft Azure.

There are literally hundreds more reasons why businesses go for Microsoft Azure. For instance, hardware issues play a big part in deciding to move to the cloud. Rather than investing a ton of money on new hardware and getting people to install it, and then reinstating all of your old software and data - it takes a lot less effort and money to just move everything to the cloud.

Another very important and relevant reason that gets businesses interested in Microsoft Azure is cost efficiency. Microsoft Azure cuts overall IT expense by a considerable margin because of the platform's ability to speed up and automate standard IT processes. This helps companies save a ton of capital hiring and enables them to invest their budget into something that will actually help them improve their core business and grow faster.

In a world where 90% of businesses have given up their physical offices and opted for a full remote model, the cloud-based infrastructure of Microsoft Azure really comes to shine. Azure employees to work from anywhere they want and pick up right where they left off, regardless of their physical location.

Azure’s security is also a big game changer in the post-COVID world. It has the absolute best security protocols and systems in the industry, that are actually super affordable. In case you didn’t know, Azure comes with free, massive security updates that ensure your classified documents remain inaccessible to everyone outside your organization. Pretty great, right?

What Makes Azure Great (from a Developer’s Standpoint)

Developers now have the option to create different cloud solutions in Visual Studio and connect them directly to an Azure cloud server, which is a dream come true for all senior developers who remember how the world was like when cloud computing was still in its infancy.

Since we at Share IT are primarily Windows developers, opting for Azure was a no brainer for us.

Because of the easy integration between desktop development and Azure cloud instances, we now have the option to build and manage various software projects for our customers directly in the cloud.

Fun fact: our own website was built as an Azure Web App and is hosted on an Azure server.

Even though people tend to have different reasons for opting for Microsoft Azure, here’s a list of the most common ones:

  • Easy integration with Visual Studio
  • Super intuitive dashboard
  • Unrival level of security for app development
  • Unique support for ASP.NET, Node.js, Java, PHP and Python
  • Ability to provide great infrastructure with high availability (99.5% SLA uptime)
  • Insane supply of app templates available in Azure Marketplace
  • Option to easily integrate with apps developed using Azure Web Apps service (like Dropbox, Salesforce, Office 365, etc.)
  • Simple and fast creation of virtual machines for testing third-party applications
  • Creation of scripts that can run on virtual machines
  • Ability to create apps with pre-installed WordPress, which is now a super popular solution for teams that tend to have two websites (one just for WP where marketing people can easily publish content)
  • Super deep app health and performance analytics that enable developers to easily track the status of their apps and make cost-effective improvements

Overview of Azure Development

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Azure offers three main things:

  • Software as a service (SaaS)
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS)
  • Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

All of these solutions come with integrated cloud services, bundled suites and features that include different programming languages, tools, and structures to help companies on multiple fronts when it comes to cloud computing.

The actual development happens on Azure’s App Service. This is one of the main Azure products.

In a nutshell, Azure’s App Service is a fully managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) that gives businesses all the tools and services they need to create reliable and scalable web apps, mobile apps, API apps, and logic apps in a single instance.

Azure Web Apps can be considered as a main component of this platform. It's a fully managed service where skilled programmers can develop and deploy web apps.

Azure Web Apps comes with multiple powerful goodies like:

  • Built-in development operations
  • Continuous integration with Visual Studio Online and GitHub
  • Staging and production support
  • Automatic patching

All of these options provide developers with everything they need to quickly build great web apps and integrate them with other cloud systems.

Looking for a Strategic Azure Development Partner? We’re Here for You

If you’re looking for a strategic Azure development partner, you’ll be happy to learn that Share IT specializes in Windows technologies. We know how important it is for our clients to have experts to lean on which is why we continuously work on improving our service delivery management and ensuring everyone is on the same page.

We are happy to share more information about our experience, portfolio, and customer success to help you assess whether or not we could be a good business fit. Our proven track record on security and Microsoft Azure certifications are just a tip of the iceberg when it comes to objective proofs of the quality of our services.

Interested in jumpstarting your Azure development project with us? Contact us today and we’ll get back to you ASAP.