Microsoft Innovation Center Brussels

So you are up and running with your brand new Bizspark subscription and full of ideas how your next killer product or service is going to conquer the world. Now you are wondering, who or what is going to host your app: your trusty on-premises server sitting in your basement, or the cloud. Of course nowadays everybody is raving about the cloud, but why is that exactly? What are the benefits of the Azure cloud, for you?

Reason 1: reliability

Sure, your server in your basement is up for the job, but how much do you trust your hardware? Hard drives can fail, power supplies can short-circuit, and your internet connection can go down. When you host your app in the cloud, it’s going to get deployed in a state-of-the art data center. Actually, even better, it’s going to get deployed in at least 2 state-of-the-art data centers by default. If one of them goes down, the other one automatically takes over. You’ll share the same enterprise-tested platform that powers Skype, Office 365, Bing, and Xbox. Azure offers a 99.95% availability SLA, 24×7 tech support, and round-the-clock service health monitoring. Feel free to check our SLA’s!

Reason 2: scalability

Of course you (and we as well) hope your new app is going to be amazing, and highly successful. While this would be fantastic, it does have a serious impact: your infrastructure needs to be able to cope with the high loads, the media attention etc. Typically you do this by making your infrastructure more performant (scaling-up) or by adding more infrastructure (scaling-out). Both of these techniques will require you to buy more hardware, and you better plan for it since consumers tend to forget about your app if it doesn’t live up to it promises when they try it. Relying on the cloud means you will be able to deal with scalability easily: adding more or better infrastructure can be as simple as sliding a slider. Even more, Azure will allow you to automatically scale out when high loads are noticed. And of course it will scale down when the loads is less. Check out the details about scaling up, scaling out and auto scaling in Azure over here.

.

Reason 3: cost

When reading the first and the second reason to choose for the cloud, you may think: “hey, I can have reliable and scalable infrastructure in my own data center”. While this is probably very true, you probably won’t be able to do it at the same low cost we’ll charge you in Azure. Think about the investments, both in hardware as in effort, you’d have to do to build an infrastructure which is both reliable and scalable. And then check how much we’d charge you in Azure for the equivalent by using our online calculator. Additionally we are committed to stay competitive in the market, check out for example our recently reduced pricing for storage.

Reason 4: compatibility

While many apps rely on Microsoft technologies such as Windows, .NET, SQL Server, ASP.NET …, it’s totally possible your app is built on a very different technology stack. No problem: Azure supports any operating system, language, tool, and framework— from Windows to Linux, SQL Server to Oracle, C# to Java. It puts the best of Windows and Linux ecosystems at your fingertips, so you can build great applications and services that work with every device. Just to give one example: learn how you can quickly spin up a Linux Virtual Machine in Azure over here.

Interested or even convinced?

TODO: call to action

Jan Tielens is a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft in Belgium. He is working on apps in a mobile & cloud-first world. Besides that he likes writing code, photography, design and the Internet of Things. You can follow him on twitter via @jantielens.