Growing a Startup. Part 1: Why Is It Worth Using Azure?

Have you ever dreamed of having a rapidly growing IT startup? Of course you have! And maybe it is already happening because you are a man of action, aren’t you? Well, it doesn’t matter at all, because, in any case, you should know that the development process isn’t easy but must succeed in the long term. 

Before you dive into this article, let me tell you one thing. This article is part of our brand-new series called “Growing a startup”. We love to work with startups, and because of that, we decided to help them in any way we can. 

From idea to execution

Your startup is like a seed – it either grows or fades. And its development process definitely needs to be taken care of. It is complicated that in a case of a seed but it can be divided into three simple steps.

Step 1 – Idea

This is the easiest and the hardest part of the process. The easiest because it is quite easy to come up with an idea. The hardest because the idea itself isn’t worth a dime. Why is that? Because even an innovative idea is not a guarantee of success. Sometimes it’s even the opposite – there may be a reason that nobody has created such a solution yet. 

Step 2 – Validation

Proper validation means money, period. Of course, doing market research can be useful, too, but it won’t put money in your pocket. In other words, proper idea validation means getting your first customers, who will pay you even before your product or service will hit the market! Pretty awesome, huh? 

Step 3 – Execution

Finally, the icing on the cake! It’s the execution that makes you stand out from the crowd. Or not. It’s up to you what you will do with that opportunity. 

We have a ready-to-sell solution! Now what? 

Let’s say that we have decided to create software. In this article, we won’t consider whether it is better to use cloud hosting or local hosting because we strongly believe that the first option is the best option. Why is that? 

Wait a minute! What does Azure have to do with all of that? 

In case you don’t know, Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft. It is meant for building, testing, deploying and managing applications and services. In short, it is a service that we can use to host our software. 

Let’s say that we have decided to go with Azure. 

We can differentiate two main cases: 

1. Small number of users and small architecture
   Problem: what to do if we have a lot of users from the start or during the first three months after the start? 
2. Large number of users and big architecture
   Problem: what to do if the vast part of resources won’t be used?

Benefits of using Azure in the face of these problems

The main benefit is that we always take only what we need at the moment. 

What’s more? 

1. At the beginning, we can have a small number of users but as their number increases, we can easily scale the solution, 
2. There is no need to install the whole infrastructure at once – more elements can be added later as separate services, 
3. We don’t have to recruit admins because hardware administration is on the side of Azure, 
4. In the case of jumps in traffic, we can configure our cloud service so that more resources would be available only during these jumps. Thanks to this, we can optimise costs, 
5. We don’t have to build everything from scratch, because in the cloud, we have a vast selection of additional services that we can use, 
6. Security is the essential thing – periodical backups, support, admins.
7. Salary survey and market trends report for startups

Summary

If this isn’t enough for you, Microsoft has created a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator (https://www.tco.microsoft.com/), which is available for free. You can see for yourself if and how much you will save by using cloud services rather than on-premise solutions.