The cloud is a shared resource, so getting the performance your apps need means paying close attention to your requirements and choosing an environment that’s tailored to your applications and your business needs. Microsoft Azure offers many choices that let you customize your cloud usage to satisfy business demands, even for applications that are highly resource-intensive.

In order to build your cloud properly, you need to start by analyzing your applications in their current environment. Take a look at the applications’ current server resources, including processors and memory, the storage they need and how often they access it, and their network utilization. Make special note of the applications that are close to hitting thresholds or running into bottlenecks. With this information in mind, you can start investigating your options in Azure.

Compute Performance

Processor speeds and number of CPU cores are the main drivers of the compute performance you’ll get from Azure. Virtual machines in Microsoft Azure come in a variety of instance sizes with different characteristics to support different types of application loads.

Choices include the H- series that can support computationally intensive applications and are designed for high-performance computing and the F series for applications that require fast CPUs but not much memory. The N series use GPUs to accelerate graphics performance. The A- series offers both standard and compute-intensive variations.

Storage Performance

Before evaluating your storage options, consider which storage performance metric is most relevant for your application, whether IOPS, latency, or throughput. Microsoft Azure offers two varieties of storage, Standard Storage and Premium Storage.

Standard Storage offers multiple types of storage, including blobs, tables, queues, and files, each of which is best suited for different kinds of data and applications. Blobs support unstructured data; tables support structured data; queues support messaging; and files support the SMB file-sharing protocol.

Premium Storage uses solid state drives to support applications that need high performance, low-latency disk access.

Network Performance

Your internal network, your connection to Azure, and the connections between your Azure instances will all affect your users’ perceptions of application performance. Analyze your traffic to understand your internal network bottlenecks.

For network connections to Azure, a dedicated connection, known as ExpressRoute, accelerates performance and increases security by eliminating usage of the public Internet. To increase network speeds between your Azure VMs, enable accelerated networking.

Achieve Performance Results

Because of the many options for working with Microsoft Azure, it can be difficult to be sure you’re making the right decisions. Working with experts can help you achieve the application performance results you need. The team at Prescient Solutions is a Microsoft Partner. We can help you explore how Microsoft Azure can support your business, help you transition your applications, and monitor and support your Azure VMs once the transition is complete. Contact us to learn more about our Microsoft Azure services and begin creating a cloud customized to meet your business needs.

Additional Microsoft Azure Resources

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Azure Stack Brings the Benefits of the Cloud to Your Data Center

Use Blockchain as a Service in Microsoft Azure to Keep Records Safe from Tampering