Q9. What are the typical characteristics of azure application?

Azure platform is suitable for applications:

1. which are accessed by huge number of users
2. with many parallel processes
3. which experience load which is different at different times in a period
4. whose longevity cannot be estimated

1. Which are accessed by huge number of users

An application which is accessed by a large number of users is ideal for deployment on Azure platform. This Application used by millions of users all around the word should be scalable. Such applications can be easily created and deployed on Azure platform. Scalable application are divided into roles and instances of these roles are increased to meet the surge in the traffic. Such scalable applications also need scalable storage. Azure provides Table storage and Blob storage to store terabytes of data.

2. An Application which has many parallel processes is called HPC application

HPC stands for High performance computing. This is one type of parallel processing application. A HPC application needs a lot of CPU power at once to complete a job. Traditionally, organizations use clusters to get lot of computing power to process the HPC application. Using Windows HPC server 2008 R2, organizations can easily run a HPC application to perform a job at once.

With Windows azure, the trend is changing. Instead of buying servers and maintaining clusters, organizations can use Azure and create Azure VMs and run them in parallel at once to process the job. Note that HPC application is divided into components called jobs and these components run simultaneously on the VMs to complete the task.

3. which experience load which is different at different times in a period

Let us say your website analytics shows an average traffic of 5000 hits per day and a peak traffic before lunch time and dinner time. This means that your web site has a varied usage pattern. Such applications require scaling which is dynamic that is, the resources available for the application are higher during the peak times. Windows Azure offer features to implement dynamic scaling.

4. Whose longetivity cannot be estimated

Many applications exist for a period which cannot be estimated. For example, an application use to conduct a survey or an application launched as a test case. Such applications can be developed and deployed on the Azure platform without incurring cost on permanent infrastructure and licensed software. When we deploy an azure, we can withdraw the application and incur no more costs.

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