21/04/2012
Microsoft Windows Azure Platform is a Microsoft cloud computing platform used to build, host and scale web applications through Microsoft data centers. Azure is classified as platform as a service and forms part of Microsoft's cloud computing strategy, along with its software as a service offering, Microsoft Online Services. The platform consists of various on-demand services hosted in Microsoft data centers and commoditized through three product brands. These are Windows Azure(an operating system providing scalable compute and storage facilities), SQL Azure (a cloud-based, scale-out version of SQL Server) and Windows Azure AppFabric (a collection of services supporting applications both in the cloud and on premise). Microsoft has announced free Ingress for all the customers of Azure .
Microsoft has also published plans to offer the Windows Azure Platform Appliance, which can be hosted in non-Microsoft data centers. This will enable resellers, such as HP, Dell, Fujitsu and eBay, to offer cloud services based on the Microsoft Azure Platform.The Windows Azure Platform is an application platform in the cloud that allows Microsoft datacenters to host and run applications. 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 which provides a computation environment with Web Role, Worker Role, and VM Role;
Storage which focuses on providing scalable storage (Blobs, non-relational Tables, and Queues) for large-scale needs (Relational Database functionality is offered through SQL Azure, which is a scalable version of SQL Server that runs on the Azure platform); and
Fabric which uses high-speed connections and switches to connect nodes consisting of several servers together. Fabric resources, applications, and services running are managed by the Windows Azure Fabric Controller service. It acts as the kernel of the Windows Azure distributed cloud operating system, providing scheduling, resource allocation, device management, and fault tolerance for the nodes in the Fabric. It also provides high-level application models for intelligently managing the complete application lifecycle, including deployment, health monitoring, upgrades, and de-activation.
The Windows Azure Platform provides an API built on REST, HTTP, and XML that allows a developer to interact with the services provided by Windows Azure. Microsoft also provides a client-side managed class library which 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 also offers Content Delivery (CDN) services as an option. The Azure CDN enables worldwide low-latency delivery of static content from Azure Storage to end-users from 24 data centers worldwide.
Windows Azure ranked first among all cloud-platform providers in cloud speed test conducted by application performance management vendor Compuware.
