Windows Azure

 

Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure 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, XML, and PHP.

Use Windows Azure to:

• Add Web service capabilities to existing packaged applications
• Build, modify, and distribute applications to the Web with minimal on-premises resources
• Perform services (large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations, etc.) off premises
• Create, test, debug, and distribute Web services quickly and inexpensively
• Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources
• Reduce the effort and costs of IT management

Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. SQL Azure will deliver a rich set of integrated services that enable you to perform relational queries, search, reporting, analytics, integration and synchronize data with mobile users, remote offices and business partners. Currently, SQL Azure offers relational database service called Microsoft SQL Azure Database. Other services will be available in future.

Microsoft also offers cloud applications ready for consumption by customers such as Windows Live™, Microsoft Dynamics™, and other Microsoft Online Services for business such as Microsoft Exchange Online and SharePoint® Online. The Windows Azure Platform lets developers provide their own unique customer offerings by offering the foundational components of compute, storage, and building block services to author and compose applications in the cloud.

 

 

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