Azure Cloud Services & Amazon Cloud Services
Cloud Computing Overview
Cloud computing is a model whereby a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) provides on-demand network access to a
multi-tenant pool of configurable computing resources. These resources may consist of networks, servers,
storage, applications and services. In terms of the geo-location of the cloud, the business entity typically has no
control or knowledge of the exact location of the provided resources, though they may be able to choose a
general location, so as to reduce network latency (Mell & Grance, 2011).
We find that CSPs typically offer their services in a number of set ways. One of these is Infrastructure as a
service (IaaS) where the entity outsources its’ operational equipment such as storage, hardware, servers and
networking components. Platform as a service (PaaS) contrasts with IaaS, in that infrastructure resources are
sold in conjunction with hosted software applications that the entity may use to develop business solutions.
While this may seem quite similar to Software as a service (SaaS), the distinction is that the CSP provides pre-
configured applications to the entity, such as billing systems, project management, ERP, CRM solutions, et
cetera.
Azure Cloud Services
Windows Azure Storage (WAS) is but one of the services that Azure provide. Through WAS, customers are
afforded nearly limitless amounts of storage, that may be accessed from anywhere. At the time of this report by
(Calder et al., 2011) WAS storage exists in the form of Blobs (files), Tables (structured storage), and Queues
(message delivery) that are used for temporary storage structures for storing messages passed between cloud
application processes.
Windows Azure also offers provides general cloud-based computing resources, as well as Internet-based
applications such as Dynamics CRM Online for customer-relationship management, Exchange Online for
messaging, Office Communications Online for instant messaging, and SharePoint Online for collaboration
(Leavitt, 2009).
Furthermore, much like AWS, Azure is known for its’ easily deployed virtual machine images. In addition,
Azure provides web-hosting and deployment of web applications. There is also the Microsoft Azure SQL
Database, which may scale to thousands of RDMS in the cloud.
Amazon Cloud Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS)) is also known for its’ storage abilities in the form of Simple Storage Service
(S3), consisting of buckets and objects. The buckets may be thought of as directories, and each bucket may
have one or more objects, with a maximum object size of 5GB (Dewan & Hansdah, 2011).
As with Azure, AWS also has a message queuing service, the Simple Queue Service (SQS), for connecting
loosely coupled service components. The SQS is utilized as a reliable and scalable service that enables
asynchronous message-based communication between the distributed components of an application (Yoon,
Gavrilovska, Schwan & Donahue, 2012).
And it is the wide array of applications and services that make AWS such a sought after and utilized CSP.
There is the Amazon EC2 which provides access to server instances on demand. Amazon Relational Database
Service (RDS) is a SQL database service, offering a number of database engine options. Amazon ElastiCache
is used to cache hits to your websites, and Amazon Elastic MapReduce is used for processing large data sets.
Related to website management is the Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) (“Amazon,
2010).
The Governing Domain Principles
At first blush, when we examine cloud computing we may be lead to believe that it is governed by data
architecture principles. These principles identify how the data is kept, their access and use, as well as defining
the interfaces for application system components. Yet, an argument may also be made for the principles of
technology architecture. These principles describe and identify the architecture which links information
systems, service networks and components (Alonso, Verdun & Caro, 2010).
Finally, in terms of the business benefits of cloud computing, there are minimal upfront infrastructure
investment costs. There is just-in-time Infrastructure, which mitigates the issue of an item of ours’ becoming
popular and our infrastructure not scaling, rendering us a victim of our own success, or our investing heavily
and the item does not sell, and we are then a victim of our failure (Varia, 2010).
References
Alonso, I. A., Verdun, J. C., & Caro, E. T. (2010). The IT implicated within the enterprise architecture model:
Analysis of architecture models and focus IT architecture domain. 2010 IEEE International Conference on
Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA). doi:10.1109/soca.2010.5707174
Amazon, A. W. S. (2010). Amazon Web Services. Available in: http://aws. amazon. com/es/ec2/(November
2012).
Calder, B., Simitci, H., Haridas, J., Uddaraju, C., Khatri, H., Edwards, A., … Wu, J. (2011). Windows Azure
Storage. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles - SOSP ’11.
doi:10.1145/2043556.2043571
Dewan, H., & Hansdah, R. C. (2011). A Survey of Cloud Storage Facilities. 2011 IEEE World Congress on
Services. doi:10.1109/services.2011.43
He, K., Fisher, A., Wang, L., Gember, A., Akella, A., & Ristenpart, T. (2013). Next stop, the cloud.
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference - IMC ’13.
doi:10.1145/2504730.2504740
Leavitt, N. (2009). Is Cloud Computing Really Ready for Prime Time? Computer, 42(1), 15–20.
doi:10.1109/mc.2009.20
Mell, P., & Grance, T. (2011). The NIST definition of cloud computing (draft). NIST Special Publication 800-
145. Retrieved from http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800 -145/SP800-145.pdf
Varia, J. (2010). Architecting for the cloud: Best practices. Amazon Web Services. Retrieved from
http://wwwnew.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring11/cos448/web/docs/week7_reading2.pdf
Yoon, H., Gavrilovska, A., Schwan, K., & Donahue, J. (2012). Interactive Use of Cloud Services: Amazon
SQS and S3. 2012 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (ccgrid
2012). doi:10.1109/ccgrid.2012.85
