AVAware on Azure:
AVAware Web Services now Hosted by Microsoft

Goodbye traditional web hosting services and hello Microsoft Azure! AVAware has flipped the metaphorical switch on our traditional web hosting methods in favor of the Microsoft Azure platform.

AVAware is pleased to announce that all our web/cloud based services, including AVAware.com, will be moving to the Microsoft Azure platform. Azure is a collection of enterprise, mobile, and web applications built, deployed, and managed across a global network of datacenters. The fact of the matter is that all web hosts are not created equal. Web hosts can vary tremendously based on such things as the types of services they offer, and range of resources that can make available to the sites they maintain. AVAware has always used prominent and well established web hosting companies to maintain our presence on the World Wide Web. Everything from the site our visitors see at www.avaware.com to the “back end” SQL servers that hold data such as catalogs and user subscriptions, have resided on “web servers” maintained by our “web hosts”. For many years now in fact, AVAware has been using one of North Americas largest “traditional” web hosts, which provides similar hosting and services to countless corporate clients.

These “traditional” web hosts provide a computer onto which a web site can be uploaded, that can then be accessed by anyone with the corresponding web address (URL). Based on the size of the site, and its volume of visitors, the computer they provide may or may not be shared with other web sites. As such, the degree to which someone renting that computer can affect the way it’s configured can be greatly restricted. While this type of hosting service has been the standard platform for offering websites and web applications since the early ages of the internet, these single-machine (and often shared) systems have obvious limitations. The lone computer that stores the website code and data, and from which all resources are served, is limited by the amount of bandwidth, CPU, RAM, and drive space available to it. Performance issues may arise when a high level of web traffic occurs, and on a server where multiple websites are stored, these issues are compounded.

Enter the modern web host... On the Microsoft Azure platform, our data and code will no longer be stored on single locations, but instead stored across multiple servers and data centers around the world; our data is replicated globally and user demands are balanced across many servers. What this means for users is that as bandwidth demand increases, it will be answered with additional scaled machine resources without any interruption in service. Also, if one of our site servers were to fail, Azure would recognize this and coordinate our recovery within seconds using replicated data stored across the planet to recover our systems without even the slightest interruption of service. In terms of implementation, thing couldn’t be more ideal. Azure technology is designed to integrate with key Microsoft technologies and will therefore be an extremely smooth migration.

AVAware always strives to provide software solutions that are unrivalled, and Microsoft’s Azure will provide a level of flexibility and stability that will bring our website, catalog and application updates to the highest level of availability, speed and reliability. AVAware’s transition to Microsoft Azure will occur gradually over the month of December 2015, beginning with minor back-end services and concluding with AVAware.com itself. The entire process is expected to be completely seamless and transparent to our users. Every component will have redundant safeguards in place to prevent any interruptions of service during this transition.

We welcome any questions, comments or suggestions about any topic mentioned in this edition of AVAwire. Please visit our website for more information, or contact us directly at (416) 239-9099.