Initial Assessment of the Available Azure Services

Delos Cloud published its service portfolio today. It provided information on which cloud services (Azure and Office) are offered and when they will be available. In this article, I would like to offer an initial assessment and discuss possible special features.

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The details provided today by Delos Cloud show which Azure services will be available in the Delos Cloud. It is not as expected and as communicated in advance by Delos Cloud, but it is confirmed that the Delos Cloud service portfolio includes essential Azure services and functions as well as higher-value PaaS services and functions.

Thanks to the availability of Azure Virtual Networks, Azure DNS, the Azure Resource Manager, virtual machines, VPN gateways, Express Route, and EntraID, system/application landscapes, and container solutions can be mapped and operated smoothly in the Delos Cloud. At the same time, the Delos Cloud offers everything required to support connectivity and seamless integration between the cloud and existing landscapes.

In our experience, many customers implement the move to the cloud is implemented via a so-called "lift & shift" for many customers." With "lift & shift," existing architectures are transferred to the cloud or cloud resources essentially unchanged, quickly and easily, and almost without interruption. Providing a wide selection of virtual machine types will make this tried-and-tested scenario possible from the outset with the Delos Cloud.

The D-series virtual machines, also known as "workhorses" and used in almost all of our customer environments, are available in different variants in the Delos Cloud. These machines are declared "General Purpose" and fulfill exactly this purpose. Just like on-prem, both individual and standard applications can be operated on these servers quickly and cost-effectively.

A further look at the Delos Cloud specification shows machines from the E and F series that are used and deployed in customer scenarios for particular purposes. The E series machines have a very high RAM ratio and are, therefore, ideally suited for RAM-heavy applications, such as the operation of relational databases. They are also the ideal basis for operating SAP HANA in the cloud. The F series ideally supports applications with high CPU requirements - especially web servers or complex, long-running batch systems.

The A and B series VMs supplement the Delos Cloud service portfolio. The A-series includes small and inexpensive machines that are used in customer situations, particularly for development and testing. They also host supporting components or tools such as code repositories. The B-series machines have lower costs and no particular performance. However, they can accumulate additional CPU performance in the short term and are very useful for compiling software projects, for example.

There are a few more types of virtual machines in the Public Azure Cloud than in the Delos Cloud service portfolio. These machine types are more specifically tailored and usually fulfill a specific purpose.

It is a pity that the G-series machines are not listed in the Delos Cloud specification. These VMs with powerful GPUs are explicitly used for training and operating AI applications. Given the current trends and further developments, I am certainly not the only one hoping for a timely expansion of the Delos Cloud service portfolio.

The German Administrative Cloud Strategy (DVS) calls for developing and promoting container-based workloads. This aspect can be fully implemented with the services offered by the Delos Cloud. As the basis for this architecture, the Delos Cloud offers the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in the standard tier. The IaaS service supports the development and operation of modern applications and allows full access to the Kubernetes Control Plane. The AKS is supplemented by Azure Container Instances (ACI). The ACI is a simplified way of deploying containers quickly and efficiently. This allows web resources to be offered rapidly or long-running batch processes to be mapped.

The Azure Container Registry rounds off the offering. This service enables the management of images and is a central component of modern CI/CD processes.

Containers have become an integral part of our customer environments. Many of our customers use container solutions for a wide variety of scenarios and collaborate with us in a wide variety of operating/cooperation models.

More and more workloads are being converted into event-based architectures to leverage the benefits of cloud services. The core element of this architecture is asynchronous, event-based communication between specialized components. The Delos Cloud offers various services to implement this type of communication: With the help of Azure Service Bus, messages from business processes can be delivered in a trustworthy and guaranteed manner. The Azure Event Hub helps to process large volumes of events in real-time. There is also the option of using the Azure Event Grid. These components also make it possible to react to events. The unique thing about the Event Grid is that the Azure components themselves use this system to communicate. As a developer, you can use an event from the Azure Event Grid to be informed that a new file has been stored in a specific storage. Finally, the Azure Notification Hub is offered to bring so-called events to the end user's devices. This service allows data to be scaled to smartphones or Windows PCs at scale.

In addition to developing an exemplary system architecture, secure communication with the outside world is an essential issue in operating cloud workloads. This is not a surefire success and must also be actively designed, implemented, operated, and further developed in the cloud. The Delos Cloud's service portfolio, thanks to many services, enables the mapping of common concepts.

An important service is the Azure Firewall. This service enables the efficient monitoring and control of all incoming and outgoing data from level 3 to level 7. The Delos Cloud, the service is available in the Basic, Standard,, and Premium tiers.

The Delos Cloud provides Azure Express Route and the Azure VPN Gateway to map hybrid scenarios or secure workloads with exceptionally high protection requirements. The Express Route supports a stable and powerful connection of entire data centers, while the VPN Gateway is responsible for secure point-to-point communication.

The Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects web applications. It offers exceptional protection against known attack patterns such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting. The unique feature of the Azure WAF is its high level of integration with the Azure Application Gateway load balancer or the Azure Front Door content delivery network.

In addition to the aforementioned cloud advantages, the use of PaaS services (Platform as a Service) is also an important cloud advantage that customers highly value. When using PaaS, the platform or the platform operator takes over recurring operational tasks such as patching, sizing, or monitoring. The customer of the PaaS service can, therefore, concentrate fully on the implementation and optimization of their applications.

Of course, the Delos Cloud also offers a wide range of PaaS services to support the efficient implementation of services and processes.

The Delos Cloud provides the familiar app service in many tiers for operating your own implementations. All the customer has to do is select the required computing power and the desired operating system. They can then deploy their application to the cloud. The Delos Cloud PaaS service takes care of everything else. Windows and Linux are available as operating systems. Containers can also be deployed in the app service.

In addition to the App Service, the Delos Cloud also offers the established services Logic Apps, Data Factory, and HDInsights, which are frequently used by our customers. Logic Apps offers a graphical modeler to develop workflows and allows different services to communicate with each other. Data Factory is a service that supports the data integration of various components. It is serverless and currently provides over 90 connectors. This Azure service has proven its worth to our customers in recent years, particularly in the mapping of hybrid scenarios.

As data analysis and big data are also increasingly critical in public administration, it is good that HDInsights is also becoming part of the Delos Cloud offering. HDInsights makes it possible to deploy proven open-source applications such as Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, or Hadoop in seconds and saves tedious installation and configuration processes.

The Delos Cloud does not provide 100% of the Azure services in the public cloud. Unfortunately, Azure Automation is missing as an established service for the operation of scaling cloud environments. This "little helper" takes over many recurring tasks in day-to-day operations. For example, a replacement or workaround for this can be a Jupyter installation. This tool is open-source and enables the execution of runbooks.

In my opinion, the Azure Container Apps are also missing. This service abstracts Kubernetes to a PaaS level. The container apps are convenient for proof of concepts (PoCs) and breakneck development cycles. This service would undoubtedly have helped with the development of cloud-native applications.

Another powerful service that will not be available on the Delos Cloud (for the time being) is the Azure Cosmos DB. Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL database that guarantees high reliability and low latency. I believe a mature NoSQL solution on the Delos Cloud is still missing. I hope that the Delos Cloud service will be expanded shortly.

Finally, there is still the question that many customers from the Azure environment still ask themselves: Where do I store my code? According to rumors, Azure DevOps is also close to its End of Life (EoL). Therefore, in my opinion, the classics such as Github, Bitnami, or Bitbucket are a good choice. You can also host your own GitLab in your environment.