Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure, originally named Windows Azure [76], was launched in 2008. Mi-crosoft desired to join in the rivalry of the cloud based services. Amazon had started their own counterpart few years earlier and Microsoft realized the market opportunity’s as well. In 2014 Windows Azure was renamed Microsoft Azure [76] and it had already gained substantial position at the cloud market. However, the starting point was some-thing different. Azure was originally built with the Silverlight ecosystem [77]. In 2011 there was a change in the management of the Azure division and platform was changed for much lighter HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language). From this point Azure started the eminent growth. [77] Azure utilizes exactly the same business model with AWS, pay-as-you-go. Azure operates on 30 regions (datacenters) at the moment and they have 8 more on the horizon. [78] Azure provides 100 different cloud based products for their customers [79].

Microsoft has divergent pricing method for new users when compared with AWS. Az-ure offers 170 euros of credit which user can utilize in any of their cloud service prod-ucts [80]. Method can be considered with the use of Azure pricing calculator [81]. In case of implementing the thesis practical part with Azure services, amount of credits provided for new customer would withstand one and half months of executing the solu-tion [81]. This is a considerable difference when compared with AWS Free Tier offer.

However, Azure van compete with the mentioned fact that credits are valid for any ser-vice in their product line.

Microsoft has a well-known experience over the security and reliability issues working with their global product line. Microsoft as an operator itself is kept in value and with high probability; the company will remain existence for years to come. Azure is a direct competitor for AWS and has already gained considerable amount of partners [82] and customers [83]. Meaning that closing down Azure platform would extensively affect their brand and image as a company.

Microsoft has a concept called Security Development Lifecycle that is a software opment process where security issues and compliances are addressed during the devel-opment project. Assume Breach is a concept through which Microsoft performs testing for the services. Team of trained security experts simulates real-time attacks against the network. [84] At the level of physical security, Azure datacenters are prepared for sud-den power loss and any physical intrusion or network outages. Customers are eligible to build their own isolated networks within their regime and operate between these re-gimes via private IP addresses. Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections between

Azure cloud and customer location are also conceivable. Azure has committed for EU Model Clause. An EU data protection law that regulates the data provision outside the EU economical region. In addition, Microsoft Azure is acting along US-EU Safe Harbor Framework and US-Swiss Safe Harbor Program. Microsoft was one of the original sub-scribers of ISO/IEC 27018 international guideline for practicing cloud privacy. [84]

From the Azure Privacy Compliance document [84] a clause is found for stating that the data location remains on the region where customer has originally made the deposition.

Microsoft move the data inside the region for another datacenter for redundancy pur-poses. However, data never leaves the economical are where it was initially stored.

Microsoft is advertising their Azure concept with extensive webinars, online tutorials and brochure marketing material. Azure team has made extensive work with their portal solution. Customers can easily select the service they need and deploy it into use. Portal interface is based on method where new pane opens on the right hand side of the source pane. Even though making the user experience friendly, not all settings are found in the same amount of time compared with AWS. Azure manages with the appearances, yet losses some on the demanding settings. Individual studies and customer tutorials are not at level compared with AWS. Years on the market and the development from the year 2011 has helped to catch the pit. However, there is still road ahead.

In the circumstances where practical part of the thesis should be implemented with Az-ure platform, multiple services has to be commissioned. FigAz-ure 7 illustrates the concept where thesis implementation objectives are conceived with Azure services. Initial limi-tations and assumptions can be revised from Chapters 1.3 and 2.4.1. When the process in the application environment is finished, the robot sends the process data via FTP.

Azure Virtual Machine service can host Ubuntu Linux [85] with FTP server. One tuto-rial gives instructions for proFTPd server [86], yet vsFTPd should work equivalently.

Reason for, vsFTPd is native FTP server for Unix based operating systems. Node.js runtime environment can be installed on Azure Linux VM. Thus, JavaScript based exe-cution for arrived process data file can be performed. [85] Customer program exeexe-cution is able to move the text file into Azure Blob Storage for permanent storing.

Figure 7. Microsoft Azure infrastructure for implementing the data gathering and visualization

Real-time monitoring can be achieved by setting up a REST service inside Azure VM.

According service acts as an interface for requesting the desired variables from robot with certain intervals. Concerned REST service is again able to communicate with Az-ure IoT Hub. IoT hub is a platform for connection of IIoT and IoT devices into Mi-crosoft ecosystem. Devices can connect with HTTP or Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) interface or via gateway in the case where no internet connection is available within the device. [87] Three programming languages are presented in the Microsoft tutorial for creating connection with IoT Hub, C#, Java and Node.js [88].

Custom App Service can act as a gateway between robot and IoT Hub providing the end-to-end connection. On top of IoT Hub, Azure provides IoT Suite through which users can visualize their data in real-time. Historical data visualization is additionally available, from the time when data submitting started. [89] Both IoT Hub and IoT Suite are applicable of communication bi-directional with the device [87].

Azure Blob Storage [90] is a service where customer can store any unstructured data, such as text files. Unstructured data could be moved into Azure SQL relational database service. From this point, data can be visualized and analyzed in detail. Final step in the implementation would be commissioning the Azure Power BI Embedded and Microsoft Power BI Desktop. Power BI Desktop [91] is one of the newest Microsoft products for creating Dashboards analyzing and visualizing business data. Power BI Embedded acts here as a gateway for retrieving the data from various sources, such as Azure SQL

Da-tabase [92]. Through Power BI, customers are applicable for making embedded visuali-zation within their web and mobile applications [92].