Although Amazon Web Services remains in the lead as far as public cloud adoption goes, Microsoft is becoming more popular among organizations as time progresses.
Probably the greatest value of using Microsoft Azure resides in application development. Constructing enterprise-class software on scalable, flexible environments fosters team creativity, and more digital resources can be allocated to complete a project. Azure allows users to conduct the following tasks:
- Conceptualize
- Design
- Test
- Deploy
Satisfying complex user demands
Partners of the Redmond, Washington-based corporation will soon provide Microsoft certification courses applicable to software engineering firms. According to Talkin’ Cloud, those attending Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, D.C. in mid-July learned of a new program dubbed Microsoft Azure Certified for Virtual Machines.
Microsoft’s reason for developing this provision was to enable software companies to better promote their offerings. Enterprises possessing this accreditation will be able to:
- List their applications in the Azure Virtual Machines Gallery
- Spread knowledge of their products through Azure and co-marketing initiatives
- Construct a sales avenue with Azure
- Access Azure’s entire customer base
For obvious reasons, there’s big money to be had in gaining this certification. In addition, Microsoft training enrollees will gain more in-depth knowledge of how to optimize application development within Azure.
A popular environment
Azure isn’t anything new, but some critics have surmised that it has yet to hit the mark with many organizations. However, there’s no doubt that it’s acclaim is growing at a surprising pace.
Data Center Knowledge reported that Azure is currently used by more than 57 percent of Fortune 500 businesses. On a weekly basis, an average of 8,000 new customers subscribe to the public cloud service. The source maintained that Azure’s coverage will soon reach 16 different regions across the globe.
A boon for startups
It seems that whenever a new idea for a mobile application or enterprise software solution arises, a company is built up around that idea. What does this fledgling company consist of? Typically three to 10 people with limited resources.
Suppose a startup is creating a data compression program geared toward large businesses. In order to make it deployable in a flexible manner (cloud, mobile, on-premise, etc.), the engineers need to experiment with and test its creation on a platform that can sustain such complex activity.
Once the application is developed as a cloud provision, where is the company going to advertise it? By making its product available to Azure users, it will be able to reach the enterprises it developed the program for in the first place