Capabilities of Azure IaaS and How It Is Purchased
Let’s start with a completely strange example of Microsoft Azure IaaS in action. My
goal is to stress an important point that will aid in your understanding of exactly what
IaaS is: IaaS simply provides virtual machines in the cloud. What you do with those
virtual machines is pretty much up to you, provided that the usage is within the
capabilities exposed by the IaaS provider. Remember, in our private cloud it was
possible to create capability profiles that defined which features were available and
what a virtual machine could look like, such as, for example, how many vCPUs it could
have, how much memory, how many disks. Just as with a private cloud, you can
choose what storage to expose and what the networking will look like. This is exactly
the same with Microsoft Azure IaaS, and as with any IaaS solution, you create virtual
machines within the capabilities allowed, and then within the virtual machines you
install operating systems that are supported by Microsoft Azure IaaS or use some of
the provided templates in Microsoft Azure IaaS or even use your own. Behind the
scenes, at the time of this writing, Microsoft Azure runs on Windows Server 2012 R2
Hyper-V and will move to Windows Server 2016, but it is not a special version. It’s the
same Hyper-V that you and I run.
To stress this, one of the first projects I ask people to perform is to spin up a Minecraft
server in Microsoft Azure IaaS. If you don’t know what Minecraft is, go ask some kids.
They’ll tell you it’s a popular building game. A Minecraft server allows multiple people
to play together to build worlds. It’s a Java application that was never designed to run
in a public cloud service, so it’s a great example to show that you can run almost
anything in an IaaS solution and, specifically, in Microsoft Azure IaaS. It also helps
demonstrate some of the key concepts that I describe in more detail throughout the
rest of this chapter.
Before you get started, you will need a Microsoft Azure account. Your organization
may already have Microsoft Azure but may not want you to create a Minecraft server
using the corporate account. There are various ways to get Azure services:
If you have an MSDN subscription, depending on the subscription level, you have a
quota for Microsoft Azure included. Activate this subscription via the MSDN
subscription site, and under your My Account details, you will see the subscription
benefits. One of these is Microsoft Azure, and there is a link to activate it. Once it’s
activated, you will have a certain amount of Microsoft Azure credit each month.
For example, MSDN Visual Studio Ultimate subscriptions receive $150 of
Microsoft Azure credit each month and reduced prices for the consumption of
resources, as detailed at www.windowsazure.com/en-us/offers/ms-azr-0049p.
To put this into perspective, at the time of this writing, it costs around $45 to run a
single vCPU VM in Microsoft Azure for an entire month. This means that I could
run three small virtual machines all month in Microsoft Azure with the Ultimate
MSDN subscription.