You may have often asked yourself this question and searched for possible reasons as to why Microsoft Azure is the right platform for your website. With this article, I will elaborate on the many services that Microsoft Azure is offering and explain why these offers have an upper hand on their competitors. Before starting let me just clarify that Azure is not meant just to deploy websites. Websites are just one piece of the entire portal/platform. Microsoft Azure is a lot bigger than this. But I am going to talk about azure websites only.
Few remarkable services that they offer include:
1. Simplicity
Microsoft Azure offers you to start as free, scale up as your need and deploy your website in just matter of minutes. And you can also easily monitor its performance, rapidly diagnose and fix issues though it’s portal.
2. Choice of languages
It allows you to code in multiple languages i.e. it supports multiple programming languages like Python, PHP, Node.js in addition to Asp.net or C#.
3. Auto-Scaling
This is probably the best thing about azure websites. For increased performance and throughput for your websites on Microsoft Azure, you can use the Azure Management Portal to scale your Web Hosting Plan mode from Free to Shared, Basic, or Standard. You can scale your website on user demand and as per your business goals (options available in the scale tab of Management portal). Azure provides near instant provisioning to meet loads and of course you can scale down when load subsides and when you no longer need those compute resources. Azure is a pay-as-you-go service so you will pay for what you use, you don’t have to reserve resources prior than your need.
4. Abstraction from the infrastructure
Azure websites makes your life easier. To the bare minimum, in order to host a website you need a data center in which you have to be responsible for the hardware, virtualization, operating system, network, firewall , data and your application. By using MS Azure services, now you just have to be worry about your data and application. MS takes the responsibility of all the other things for you. For instance, now you don’t have to worry about the issues like load balancing or redundancy. All these services require very little configurations. You can put your energies in accomplishing more important tasks and improving your business logic.
5. Azure Gallery
This feature will let you instantly install Open Source community web applications including blogging engines, galleries and lot more to increase the utilities of your site. You can build dynamic websites in just minutes using the ready to use applications.
Here is a view to the azure gallery in portal.
Click new -> website -> from gallery
It will take you here. Now you can explore and choose according to your requirement.
6. Continuous Integration with Third party repositories
You can integrate your website with Dropbox, GIT or Team Foundation Server. You can easily deploy to Windows Azure websites from Dropbox by synchronizing code from Dropbox to Windows Azure. You can automate the deployment of websites easier by setting up auto builds. With auto builds every time a developer checks in the code, it is compiled, unit tested and automatically published on Azure website.That means now you can take advantage of free storage and make use of it in the easiest way.
7. Automate Long Repetitive Tasks using Web Jobs
Web Jobs are integrated within Azure websites, allowing you to write script (supported in various languages) and configure those scripts to run as tasks/jobs continuously or on specified intervals. The fun part is that you have absolute programmatic control in writing Web Jobs and a special SDK allows you to interact with other Azure resources like Storage, etc.
8. Make use of built-in Traffic Manager
Imagine the nightmare of your website going down at midnight. Microsoft Azure Traffic Manager allows setting up multiple websites and configure them as a single instance such that if one website goes down, the other backup takes care of it in a no brainer fashion.
The above listed features are only the high lights that illustrate the benefits of choosing Azure Portal for hosting your website. Features like maintainability, availability and reliability are baked in Azure. Now you must have a clearer picture of Azure websites and its services. Have a good day!
This story was originally published here and the featured image is the courtesy of Matricis!
