Microsoft's Windows Azure Platform is a cloud platform offering that "provides a wide range of Internet services that can be consumed from both on-premises environments or the Internet"(though the platform itself is not made available for on-premises deployments). It is Microsoft's first step into cloud computing following the launch of the Microsoft Online Services offering. In short, it's Microsoft infrastructure as a service.
Azure Services Platform is an application platform in the cloud that allows applications to be hosted and run at Microsoft datacenters. It provides a cloud operating system called Windows Azure that serves as a runtime for the applications and provides a set of services that allows development, management and hosting of applications off-premises.All Azure Services and applications built using them run on top of Windows Azure.
Windows Azure has three core components: Compute, Storage and Fabric. As the names suggest, Compute provides computation environment with Web Role and Worker Role while Storage focuses on providing scalable storage (Blobs, Tables, Queue, Drives) for large scale needs.
The hosting environment of Windows Azure is called the Fabric Controller - which pools individual systems into a network that automatically manages resources, load balancing, geo-replication and application lifecycle without requiring the hosted apps to explicitly deal with those requirements.In addition, it also provides other services that most applications require — such as the Windows Azure Storage Service that provides applications with the capability to store unstructured data such as binary large objects, queues, drives and non-relational tables.Applications can also use other services that are a part of the Azure Services Platform.
Azure Services Platform provides an API built on REST, HTTP and XML that allows a developer to interact with the services provided by Windows Azure. A client-side managed class library is also provided that encapsulates the functions of interacting with the services. It also integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio so that it can be used as the IDE to develop and publish Azure-hosted applications. Windows Azure is commercially available as of 1st Feb 2010. Users can purchase Windows Azure service time from the http://www.microsoft.com/azure website.
Azure also offers Content Delivery (CDN) services as an option. Currently in no-cost "Community Technology Preview" the Azure CDN enables worldwide low-latency delivery of static content from Azure Storage to end users from 18 data centers worldwide.
COMPETITORS:
Windows AZURE has some of its competitors also in the industry...like
- Amazon Web Services
- Engine Yard
- Google App Engine
- Heroku
- Force.com
The Windows Azure platform uses a specialized operating system, called 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 has been described as a "cloud layer" on top of a number of Windows Server systems, which use Windows Server 2008 and a customized version of Hyper-V, known as the Windows Azure Hypervisor to provide virtualization of services.
The platform includes five services — Live Services, SQL Azure (formerly SQL Services), AppFabric (formerly .NET Services), SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services — which the developers can use to build the applications that will run in the cloud. A client library, in managed code, and associated tools are also provided for developing cloud applications in Visual Studio. Scaling and reliability are controlled by the Windows Azure Fabric Controller so the services and environment don't crash if one of the servers crashes within the Microsoft datacenter and provides the management of the user's web application like memory resources and load balancing.
The Azure Services Platform can currently run .NET Framework applications compiled for the CLR, while supporting the ASP.NET application framework and associated deployment methods to deploy the applications onto the cloud platform. It can also support PHP websites. Two SDKs have been made available for interoperability with the Azure Services Platform: The Java SDK for AppFabric and the Ruby SDK for AppFabric. These enable Java and Ruby developers to integrate with AppFabric Internet services.
OFFICIAL DOWNLOADS:
- Windows Azure Virtual Lab - follow along at your own pace with the instructor
- Windows Azure SDK
- Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio
- Microsoft AppFabric (formerly .NET Services) SDK
- Microsoft SQL Data Services SDK
- Java SDK for AppFabric (formerly .NET Services)
- Ruby SDK for AppFabric
- PHP SDK for AppFabric
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