What Is Windows Azure IaaS?

by Matt Hester - November 7, 2012

Some of you may have started down the path of working with cloud computing and have run into
the phrase "Infrastructure as a service" or IaaS. You might be wondering what IaaS can
provide for you and your business. You may even get a little confused about IaaS and all the
similar terminology that is out there: PaaS, SaaS, STaaS, SECaaS, etc. In this article we are going
to take a brief look at IaaS, then we will take a longer look into Microsoft's Azure IaaS and how
you can get started with Windows Azure IaaS.

Cloud Services
To understand cloud, think quickly on your on premise datacenters. In
your datacenters you manage everything from the networking and
servers to the applications and everything in between. When you begin
to leverage clouds services you offload some or all of the management
of your datacenter services. To understand this, let’s take a quick look
at two other main cloud services: Platform as a Service (PaaS)
and Software as a Service (SaaS).

PaaS, SaaS, and Iaas

PaaS provides a platform for your applications, and you have really no
control over the platform. With PaaS you only had to manage the
applications and data, and the cloud service managed the rest of
infrastructure. This is by design: PaaS was the original offering of
Windows Azure and provided a highly scalable Windows platform for
your applications. You still architected, created, compiled, and tested
your applications to run in Windows Azure. You then uploaded the
application and configured or provisioned your storage.
With SaaS, you are not responsible for supporting the application or
any of the components. You are basically paying a provider for a
service, usually on a subscription basis. With SaaS, your provider
manages the data and platform -- really the entire backend. SaaS is
probably the most prevalent of the cloud services. Some of the SaaS
services include Office 365, CRM, Salesforce.com, and others.
Additionally there are plenty of free SaaS services like XBOX Live.

That brings us to IaaS. Azure IaaS gives you a combination of control

and the ability to leverage the cloud infrastructures. With IaaS, you
manage the application, data, runtime, middleware, and even the OS.
The main part with the virtualization and hardware are managed and
maintained by your cloud provider. You will still perform many
administrative duties in IaaS, and you will still have to install
applications, manage patches, manage virtual machines and networks
used by your virtual machines, etc. You configure the environment how
you want it, and at the end of the day it is yours! With Windows Azure
IaaS Microsoft takes the responsibility for uptime of that machine. For
example, if a machine crashes, Microsoft will spin up a new instance of
your server for you.

It's easy to get IaaS and PaaS confused. Just remember: If it

requires a developer, it’s not IaaS.

Microsoft is the only vendor to provide offerings in all three main types
of cloud computing services: IaaS, SaaS, PaaS. Microsoft provides a
full spectrum of public cloud solutions, and has a strategy of
integrating with traditional on-premises datacenters for Hybrid
scenarios. Microsoft does not limit you to go with a 100-percent private
or public cloud. This may give you the flexibility to choose the best
cloud model based on your unique organizational and application
needs.

Now let’s take a look at Windows Azure IaaS which is currently not yet
released. However, it is in customer trial (free for 90 days) and you
can sign up for a Windows Azure trial.

FREE 3-Month Trial Windows Azure ... Deploy, Monitor, Scale, Automate

Windows Azure IaaS

When Windows Azure was first launched, the focus was squarely on
PaaS and providing a platform for applications. As Windows Azure
evolved Microsoft added many new functionalities and support for
other application languages. In particular Microsoft added a function
that some of you may be familiar with called the VM Role. The VM
Role allowed you to deploy custom Windows Server 2008 R2 images to
Windows Azure. This provided a way for you install squirrely apps,
maybe error prone apps, or ones that do not install easily or quickly.
This is not IaaS -- the VM role was still PaaS. While you still built your
own image, it had to conform to the PaaS model. More importantly,
the VM role was stateless and had non-persistent local storage; you
would need to leverage Windows Azure storage service for persistent
storage. You can learn more about the VM role here on the Overview
of the Windows Azure VM Role.

And then in steps the next evolution of Windows Azure: Virtual

Machines. Virtual Machines introduces functionality that allows full
control and management of virtual machines and networking. Virtual
Machines provides persistent and easily extended storage. This allows
you to build your virtual machine directly in Windows Azure or upload
and virtual machine you created locally. This provides many options
not only for your applications that require persistent storage but also
many other infrastructure opportunities. This provides the answer to
Microsoft customers for this common for Windows Azure to provide this
functionality. This is truly IaaS.
Creating virtual machines in Windows Azure

Virtual Machines provides a true solution for IT professionals, and your

responsibilities are almost the same for your on-premise datacenters
compared to the machines hosted in Windows Azure. You will still have
the considerations to configure your virtual machine, its storage
network access, and applications you want to install. Windows Azure
Virtual Machines provides you the ability to run many of today’s key
server applications such as AD, DNS, SharePoint. The functionality is
there for you leverage. You will still have to perform your daily
administration of these services, but the main difference is that you do
not have to worry about the hardware or high availability. When you
create, or upload, a Virtual Machine in Windows Azure, the Windows
Azure service creates a replica copy for you automatically on the
backend.

Creating a VM in Windows Azure is pretty straight forward, as you

choose among these predefined VM sizes and capacity categories. The
different sizes -- from extra small to extra large -- from which you can
choose will determine many aspects of your virtual machines, whether
it be the number of CPU Cores you have dedicated for your use (or
shared in the case of extra small) or the amount of memory,
bandwidth, and number of Data Disks preconfigured for you. You will
even have the ability to include data disks that are separated from the
OS disk. Each of the persistent storage disks you create can be up to 1
TB in size. Since this is still in preview, the numbers and sizes of the
virtual machines may change when the service is released.

Hybrid Infrastructure and Iaas

One aspect that makes IaaS great is the ability to leverage IaaS as
part of overall architecture and offer the ability to extend your on-
premise data centers. I know what you're thinking: Wait, I thought I
had to put it all in the cloud or nothing. That is simply not the case.
This is a common use of IaaS, which allows you to straddle the fence
between on-premise datacenters and cloud services. You can have part
of your application on-premise and the rest in the cloud. This is a
common example of a Hybrid Infrastructure or Hybrid Cloud. IaaS
allows you to have the best of both worlds for your infrastructure
requirements and business demands. It provides native capabilities for
you to quickly network these environments together. In IaaS you can
leverage private networks for just your VMs or extend your own
datacenter into the cloud so that the machines have full participation in
your LAN and/or your extended datacenter resources.