Archive
Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Foundations – #IaaS, #Cloud, #PaaS, #Microsoft, #Azure
This series of blog posts by Thomas W Shinder – MSFT and contributors is really great and do cover the best practises and principles behind building Microsoft based private or hybrid IaaS services. Have a look at their great work!
The goal of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Foundations series is to help enterprise IT departments and cloud service providers understand, develop, and implement IaaS infrastructures. This series provides comprehensive conceptual background that combines Microsoft software, consolidated guidance, and validated configurations with partner technologies such as compute, network, and storage architectures, in addition to value-added software features.
The IaaS Foundations Series utilizes the core capabilities of the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system, Hyper-V, System Center 2012 R2, Windows Azure Pack and Microsoft Azure to deliver on-premises and hybrid cloud Infrastructure as a Service.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Foundations (this article)
Chapter 2: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Compute Foundations
Chapter 3: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Network Foundations
Chapter 4: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Storage Foundations
Chapter 5: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Virtualization Platform Foundations
Chapter 6: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Design Patterns–Overview
Chapter 7: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Foundations—Converged Architecture Pattern
Chapter 8: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Foundations-Software Defined Architecture Pattern
Chapter 9: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Foundations-Multi-Tenant Designs
Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Foundations is written and presented in a way that enables architects, designers, implementers and operators to view the content that is most relevant to them. Some readers will choose the read the entire “book”, while others will focus on areas that are most interesting and relevant to them.
At this time, the Microsoft IaaS Foundations “book” is available in web format only. In the coming days, individual files (one for each chapter) and a single file that represents a compilation of all the chapters, will be made available for download. A link to these files will be included in this article, and in each of the articles included in this “book”.
The world of cloud computing moves quickly and the underlying technologies supporting the infrastructure that powers the cloud change and improve just as fast. For this reason, each of the chapters includes a published date and the versions of the software that are discussed in the text. For non-versioned software and services (such as Microsoft Azure), a note of “feature set and capabilities as of…” date is included.
Your feedback is crucial
A lot of time, energy and expense goes…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Windows Azure Active Directory (AD) has reached General Availability!
This is cool! And I think that it’s a great step in the right direction for many companies! 🙂
Windows Azure Active Directory
Windows Azure Active Directory (Windows Azure AD) is a modern, REST-based service that provides identity management and access control capabilities for your cloud applications. Now you have one identity service across Windows Azure, Microsoft Office 365, Dynamics CRM Online, Windows Intune and other 3rd party cloud services. Windows Azure Active Directory provides a cloud-based identity provider that easily integrates with your on-premises AD deployments and full support of third party identity providers.
Use Windows Azure AD to:
Integrate with your on-premises active directory
Quickly extend your existing on-premises Active Directory to apply policy and control and authenticate users with their existing corporate credentials to Windows Azure and other cloud services.
Offer access control for you applications
Easily manage access to your applications based on centralized policy and rules. Ensure consistent and appropriate access to your organizations applications is maintained to meet critical internal security and compliance needs. Windows Azure AD Access Control provides developers centralized authentication and authorization for applications in Windows Azure using either consumer identity providers or your on-premises Windows Server Active Directory
Build social connections across the enterprise
Windows Azure AD Graph is an innovative social enterprise graph providing an easy RESTful interface for accessing objects such as Users, Groups, and Roles with an explorer view for easily discovering information and relationships.
Provide single sign-on across your cloud applications
Provide your users with a seamless, single sign-on experience across Microsoft Online Services, third party cloud services and applications built on Windows Azure with popular web identity providers like Microsoft Account, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook.
Read more about the service here!
Pricing
Access Control
Access Control is available at no charge. Historically, we have charged for Access Control based on the number of transactions. We are now making it a free benefit of using Windows Azure.
Directory
The base directory, Tenant, User & Group Management, Single Sign On, Graph API, Cloud application provisioning, Directory Synchronization and Directory Federation, is available at no charge. Certain additional capabilities such as Azure AD Rights Management will be available as a separately priced option.
Read more about pricing here!
//Richard
The IT Melting Pot! 