Windows Azure
A new platform is emerging that promises to usher in a wave of new opportunities by dramatically changing the way companies deal with IT and the software built on it. This platform ultimately makes it easier for the little guy to take innovative ideas to market through a "pay as you go" business model, avoiding many of the upfront costs and complexities of typical IT investments.
Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.
Windows Azure is currently in Community Technology Preview. Commercial availability for Windows Azure will likely be at the end of calendar year 2009.
Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST (REpresentational State Transfer), XML, and PHP.
Windows Azure is the "Windows for the cloud" and offer basic functions for your application, suchs as hosting, managing traffic, scale if it is needed, blob storage, table storage and so on.
Microsoft's Azure Services Platform is a cloud platform (cloud computing platform as a service) offering that "provides a wide range of internet services that can be consumed from both on-premises environments or the internet". It is significant in that it is Microsoft's first step into cloud computing following the recent launch of the Microsoft Online Services offering.The Azure Services Platform uses a specialized operating system, Windows Azure, to run its "fabric layer" — a cluster hosted at Microsoft's datacenters that manages computing and storage resources of the computers and provisions the resources (or a subset of them) to applications running on top of Windows Azure. Windows Azure, which was known as "Red Dog" during its development, has been described as a "cloud layer" on top of a number of Windows Server systems, which use Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V to provide virtualization of services.
The Windows Azure Fabric is a scalable hosting environment built on distributed Microsoft data centers. The Windows Azure Fabric Controller manages resources, load balancing, and the service lifecycle based on requirements established by the developer. The Fabric Controller deploys the service and manages upgrades and failures to maintain availability.
The Azure Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The Azure Services Platform includes the foundation layer of Windows Azure as well as a set of developer services which can be used individually or together.
The Azure Services Platform comprises the following developer services:
Windows Azure is the cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides you on-demand compute & storage to host, scale, and manage web applications and services on the internet in Microsoft data centers.
Microsoft .NET Services
Microsoft .NET Services are a set of Microsoft-hosted, highly scalable, developer-oriented services that provide key building blocks required by many cloud-based and cloud-aware applications. Much like the .NET Framework provides higher-level class libraries that make developers more productive, Microsoft .NET Services enables a developer to focus on their application logic rather than building and deploying their own cloud-based infrastructure services.
Microsoft SQL Data Services
Microsoft SQL Data Services (SDS) are highly scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing utility services. Built on robust SQL Server technologies and Windows Server, SDS provides highly available, secure, standards based web services that are easy to program and provision.
Live Services
Live Services is a set of building blocks within the Azure Services platform for handling user data and application resources. Live Services provides developers with an easy on-ramp to build rich social applications and experiences that can connect with over 450 million Windows Live users. Live Services includes Mesh technologies for synchronizing user’s data and extending web applications across multiple devices.
Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that enables customers to create scalable and available web applications; While Windows Server addresses the on-premises and hosting market. Going forward, Windows Azure and Windows Server will share innovations bilaterally. With the launch of Azure, Microsoft will find itself in competition with other providers of Internet storage and computing services including Amazon, Salesforce.com, and Rackspace
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