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 a flexible platform that supports multiple languages and integrates with your existing on-premises environment. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio® expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.
What is Windows Azure?Windows Azure promo
Use Windows Azure to:
* Run enterprise workloads in the cloud
* Build, modify, and distribute scalable applications with minimal on-premises resources
* Perform large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations
* Create, test, debug, and distribute Web services quickly and inexpensively
Windows Azure Benefits
* Bring your ideas to market faster and pay as you go
* Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources
* Reduce the effort and costs of IT management
* Respond quickly to changes in your business and customer needs
* Choose an on-premises or off-premises deployment model that best suits your needs.
* Scale your IT resources up and down based on your needs.
* Consume computing resources ONLY when the needs arise.
* Focus less energy on managing operational resources and constraints.
* Remove the need to manage hardware
* Use your existing development skills to build cloud applications
* Consistent development and management experience across on-premises and the cloud.
Customer Success Stories with Windows Azure
Windows Azure Features
Learn more about Windows Azure on MSDN
Computation
* Ability to run Microsoft ASP.NET Web applications or .NET code in the cloud
* Service hosting environment that includes Internet Information Services 7.0 and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0
* Security supported by flexible Code Access Security policies
* Small runtime API that supports logging and local scratch storage
* Web portal that helps you deploy, scale, and upgrade your services quickly and easily
* FastCGI support allows customers to deploy and run web applications written with non-Microsoft programming languages such as PHP
* .NET Full Trust to allow usage of additional .NET features such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
* From Full Trust .NET, developers can call into unmanaged DLLs
Simple Data Storage
* Blobs, tables, and queues hosted in the cloud, close to your computation
* Authenticated access and triple replication to help keep your data safe
* Easy access to data with simple REST interfaces, available remotely and from the data center
