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Zolv: Say it Cloud
Monday, January 16, 2012
Cloud computing is here, it works, and it matters. After running a number of projects on Amazon's cloud service, we've just delivered our first solution for Microsoft's Azure service. Virgin Holidays' website at virginatlantictravelplus.com is now driven by Zolv WTP and runs courtesy of Azure.
The headline promise of cloud technology is instant scalability with pay-as-you-go pricing, but what you get when you sign up for something with the word “cloud” in the name depends on what the supplier has decided to bundle with the service. Cloud services really fall into three main categories: software as a service, infrastructure as a service, and platform as a service.
Azure is the leading platform-as-a-service offering. When you use Azure, you don't get a server – you get a complete environment. If you're just using infrastructure as a service, then you have to manage the operating system, apply updates and monitor security. You also have to manage all the storage resources, backup regimes and network routing. With Azure, that's all taken care of. You get a complete, hands-off environment where your applications can run under automated management.
This means that interventions traditionally made by IT staff are undertaken instead by the Azure environment, taking a load of work off their hands. So, if a chip in a server that's hosting the Virgin Holidays site fails, Azure can automatically replicate to a new server and decommission the old one. The first anyone in the IT team knows about it is when the report of the fix arrives.
It's a big change from the IT processes the industry's grown up with. IT professionals are used to fighting fires and it takes a while to trust the kind of sprinkler systems built into today’s cloud environments. But much of the IT workload these days is in applying security updates and patches to common libraries, and this has to be done in a controlled and methodical manner – so we might as well leave it to software. Azure puts technology intelligently on tap, freeing up the IT team to work on what's really valuable to the business.
