Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service for building, testing and deploying applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centres. It provides Software as a Service, Platform as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service.

Azure has many services and the number of services increases year by year. Microsoft groups these services into categories according to their functionality, with some of the most popular services being Compute services, Data Management services and Storage services.

P92 has great experience using Azure and is our go-to solution when a highly scalable, reliable system with low initial start-up complexity is called for or when an automatic backup mechanism is required. Being able to configure Azure away from the portal by using Azure-CLI or Powershell is also a distinct advantage.

Our .NET based solutions are hosted on an Azure cloud platform and we suggest using App Service to host web applications which enables a great level of ease for scale up (to have stronger machine) or scale out (to have multiple instances) of our solution.

For data handling, we use Microsoft Sql Server as a Platform solution, or Azure Storage. And for caching, Azure Redis Cache provides a quick and secure way to cache your application's data.

By using Azure, we can configure our Continuous Integration solution to build and deploy our application into Azure and run tests automatically.

Success Story

Recently, we combined our knowledge of Virtual Machining and Azure Storage to create a solution for a leading and high- profile oil trading company. An advantage of using this approach was to be able to scale the virtual machine according to requirements as well as being able to utilise the many preconfigured images available through Azure Marketplace where we have full access to the server and the network configuration is customizable to suit.