Well, not quite.
I've finally given myself enough reason and motivation to write more.
That's better.
So, this is my continued attempt at a technical blog. Here, I write down things that I know, learn, and experience for the general-knowledge and well-being that I share with others. As I experience problems, I want to write them down.
So, what am I talking about today?
A colleague of mine and I were talking the other day, and he mentioned to me Windows Azure. So, let's back up a moment before we dive in.
The company that I own (Shameless link) has an Ubuntu 12.04 Linux box hosted by Rackspace so that we can do development. It hosted Web Services (Apache), E-mail Services (Postfix, Courier, SASL Authentication/Encryption, SpamAssassin), Database Services (MySQL, PostgreSQL), and a Mumble server. And all-in-all, it worked fine. We had a Team Foundation Server rented by another company, and added bandwidth, the two services was about $32 a month. We weren't using the TFS service as much as I wanted, so I had looked at killing it, but it wasn't until recently that Visual Studios had integration with Git that I felt that we could change hosting.
Back to the present day.
A colleague of mine and I were talking the other day, and he mentioned to me Windows Azure. In our conversations, he explained what he used it for, how much database and web page space he uses, and basically mentioned that it was for pennies on the dollar. So, in conversation, I learn that he obtained Microsoft Windows services for pennies on the dollar every month. So, I try to be a reasonable business man, let's take a look into it.
Boy, was I impressed. And it's even better than that.
The general notion behind 'cloud' services is that you can host web sites, databases, virtual machines, and more, in a virtual environment. But Microsoft, being the large proprietor of software that they are, made available their resources.
If you sign up for Windows Azure, what can you get?
Free:
- 10 Web Sites per region.
- 10 Mobile Services with a 20MB SQL Database with up to 500k API calls.
- An implementation of Active Directory* for up to 500k objects.
- 100k Notification pushes to active devices
*It's not a full Active Directory environment as you would see in a normal infrastructure, it's more of a user database, but you can't bind hosts to it.
So wow, for free, that's pretty impressive, especially for developers. I'm trying to cut costs, and they can run virtual machines, let's see what I can get for $32 a month with respect to my environment:
- I could get two 'Extra Small' Windows VMs, with 1Ghz CPU and 768MB of RAM for $26.79
- Two 'Extra Small' Linux VMs, with the same specifications for the same price.
So, for the cost I'm already incurring, I could build two boxes at the same cost, regardless of Operating System, and have it hosted. At this point, I was feeling pretty confident in this move, because we get the free resources on top of the purchased resources.
So I talked to my business partner, because when you're co-owned you don't make decisions like this by yourself, and he agreed once I laid out the details for him.
So, we signed up, and started spawning new virtual machines; they were ready in minutes. They had a public IP address, a public DNS name, a public firewall with port translations available, and the resources I had above.
Boy, was I impressed. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with Rackspace. In face, their management of DNS made it quite easy to get services going, and in general I had no problems with them. This was just better.
So where does it get even better than that?
Last year, the company applied to become a Microsoft BizSpark partner for software development. We have a few major applications that we want to write and sell, and it was difficult to do so because to create them, we needed licenses of things. And after explaining what we wanted to do, we were approved and joined the BizSpark community.
At first, BizSpark was great for us for licenses--Visual Studios, versions of Microsoft Windows for us to test our software on, and copies of different applications offered by Microsoft, which included but not limited to, Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Team Foundation Server, BizTalk Servers, and so much more. I estimated it was well over $500,000 in software licensing.
But we had no hosts to run these things on.
Now we do.
Because being a BizSpark partner, and joining Microsoft Azure, they give us $150 in credits a month.
A virtual machine was ~$13.
I can now cut my hosting costs down, spin up new virtual machines, and get all of my hosted needs met so that we can actually code...without having to worry about counting pennies on things. When you have a finite budget...that matters.
This is where it was even better than that.
Because now I can spin up several extra-small virtual servers, host an internal Active Directory, IIS deployment, Exchange, and TFS...without being charged.
We can finally code the way we want to, without having to worry about the costs of doing so. This is exactly what BizSpark was designed to do, and because of Windows Azure we can do it.
This is where it was even better than that.
So my next few blog posts will be covering the state of things as I install and configure Windows Server 2012, and the related content from there.
Damn, I'm more excited by this than I should be.
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