Cloud Vendors – Azure Part I
This week we are happy to introduce our monthly, long-form guide where we dive deeper into key areas that if executed well will act as the foundation for future scaling. We will start at the beginning;) with in depth discussion about cloud vendors. More specifically, this article is about cloud architecture in Microsoft Azure (a future long form tip will discuss AWS). Note that this article assumes that you are building an enterprise application with perhaps a web user interface and possibly even a desktop thick client application.
Microsoft Azure
Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. If your team’s experience is mostly with Windows and other Microsoft technologies, Azure is a great choice for your cloud vendor. Azure offers a few groups of free services, which we recommend exploring as part of your cloud vendor selection process. If you have already made up your mind to go with Azure, the 12 months for which many Azure services are free can help reduce your operating costs as you write your MVP, demo to prospects and attempt to find product-market fit.
The flagship Microsoft / Azure programming language is C# and the database of choice would be SQL Server. There are many technical resources available with expertise with these technologies. If you plan to include offshoring or work-anywhere strategies to build your company, these tech choices are safe because many of the typical offshoring locales have deep talent pools with expertise in these technologies.
Microsoft Partner Program
Also, if you are planning to select Azure and the Microsoft stack, look into becoming a Microsoft Partner. Becoming a Microsoft Partner gives you access to use all the Microsoft apps your team is already familiar with as you build the business. Key apps are the Office Suite and development tools such as Visual Studio.
Let’s assume that you have selected Azure as your cloud provider, become a Microsoft Partner, chosen C# and TypeScript for your programming languages and chosen SQL Server as your database platform. One important consideration is not just how you write your code but also how you will deploy that code to the cloud. In this regard, Microsoft has you covered with their Azure DevOps offering, which provides code repositories, work tracking capabilities, deployment pipelining, test management and more.
Given the choices above, another important decision must be made. Specifically, you need to decide which Azure services to include as part of your product technology architecture.