Introduction
You might initially think that you don't want to run in the Microsoft Cloud because you want to make your own decisions and control your own destiny. You might want to run your own servers in your own facility and make all the decisions about your application.
Perhaps you just like walking into a server room and seeing the hardware that is running the application. Although this sense of control might sound appealing at first, it is really just a lot of trouble and energy that does not advance the cause of your application.
Here are a few of the things that you have to worry about when you run your own servers:
- What operating system should I run?
- What version of the operating system is the most reliable?
- How do I protect my system from viruses and attacks?
- Do I need a firewall to protect my servers?
- What database do I run?
- What version?
- What patches?
- How many application web servers do I need?
- Do I buy enough hardware to handle my application's peak usage load?
- How much energy does my hardware take?
- If my application is so popular that it is used both in Tunisia and United States and Europe, do I need to find data center in Europe and put some hardware in Europe so that all the European users see a quick response time?
- and on and on ...
These problems do not go away just because you run on the Microsoft Infrastructure because Microsoft has some of the brightest production engineers in the world, who are very good at solving these problems and doing so very efficiently. Also the cost of purchasing resources from Microsoft's cloud of servers is likely less than purchasing, renting and maintaining the same amount of resources on your own. Microsoft focuses on providing hardware and network and you focus on building your application and the user community around your application.
