What is compute?

- [Instructor] This course is all about designing a compute strategy for using Microsoft Azure. So what exactly does the term compute mean in the context of Microsoft Azure? Let's start by defining some terms. Azure uses the term workload to mean the tasks, applications and code that you need to run in their environment. If you need to render the frames of an animated 3D movie, that's a workload. If you need to consolidate all of your company's transactions and invoices in a batch job at the end of every month, that's also a workload. If you need to serve dynamic HTML pages to your customers based on their individual accounts, that is also a workload. Not all workloads work best in the cloud and sometimes you won't be able to transfer every application that you have running in your environment into the cloud or perhaps those workloads will perform in Azure but not better than they do in your own environment so determining if a workload can operate at all in the cloud is part of designing a compute strategy. Next let's talk about the term compute itself. Cloud computing provides many different application design options and as architects, you need to make decisions about which application style works best for each workload that you have. If you simply wanted to have control over powerful Windows or Linux virtual server where you can install any software that you wish and have complete control over it, that is called a virtual machine or VM and is part of the infrastructure as a service model of cloud computing. Even if you decide to go with a virtual machine for your solution, you'll still have to make dozens of choices in terms of the optimizations and size of the machine to deployment configuration in one or more regions and each decision has price implications. For example, you could put those VMs into a server form in front of a load balancer and distribute those servers all over the world to increase the quality of your customer service but that's not your only option. You could also possibly run the code in your environment as the primary server and only use Azure as a backup in case of emergency or choose to extend your on-premises compute capability to include some Azure services as a hybrid model or another possibility is that you could package your code and give it to Azure to run on its own servers. You'll lose control over the environment but Azure provides many additional benefits to your application that you have had to manage yourself if you went the VM route and there are cost savings for this style. There is also the serverless and microservices options and we'll discuss them all in this course. You could design your application specifically to take advantage of the additional benefits of these environments as well although they sometimes further limit your options for portability. Beyond the architectural style of your application, you'll also want to think about options that improve availability, scalability, performance and/or reduced cost. Everyone has their own requirements for a computing environment and the dozens of compute options of Azure exist to allow us to optimize the cloud for our very own unique needs.