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® datacenters.
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, protocols and languages including SOAP, REST, XML, Java, PHP and Ruby. Windows Azure is now commercially available in 40 countries.
Application Scenarios:
Windows Azure is a service that allows developers to run applications and store data on servers owned and operated by Microsoft. These cloud applications can be targeted at businesses, consumers or both. Some examples are:
- Enterprises that use Windows Azure to run their own line-of-business, batch processing or large-volume computations.
- An independent software vendor (ISV) that creates a SaaS application targeted towards business users.
- Perform large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations
- An ISV that creates a SaaS application targeted towards consumers.
You can find some example Windows Azure customer and partner success Stories here.
Benefits:
- Agility: Take advantage of development tools, automated service management and global datacenter presence to respond faster to customer needs, focus on your competitive differentiators, and reach new markets.
- Efficiency: Windows Azure improves productivity and increases operational efficiency by lowering up-front capital costs. Customers and partners can realize a reduction in Total Cost of Operations of some workloads by up to 30 – 40% over a 3 year period . The consumption based pricing, packages and discounts for partners lower the barrier to entry for cloud services adoption and ensure a predictable IT spend. See Windows Azure pricing.
- Focus: Focus on delivering services and value to your customers – and not on managing technology infrastructure. Windows Azure enables you to spend less time on operational hurdles and more time focusing on your competitive differentiators.
- Simplicity: Utilize your existing skills in familiar languages such as .NET, Java and PHP to create and manage web applications and services.
- Trustworthy: Enterprise class service backed by a reliable service level agreements and a rich online services experience. Learn More.
Features:
Windows® Azure serves as the development, run-time, and control environment for the Windows Azure Platform. Windows Azure handles load balancing, resource management and life cycle management of a cloud service based on requirements that the owner of the service established. A developer who wishes to deploy an application to Windows Azure specifies the service topology, including the number of instances to deploy and any configuration settings. Windows Azure deploys the service and manages upgrades and failures to maintain availability.
Compute Services
Windows Azure offers an internet-scale hosting environment built on geographically distributed data centers. This hosting environment provides a runtime execution environment for managed code.
A Windows Azure compute service is built from one or more roles. A role defines a component that may run in the execution environment; within Windows Azure, a service may run one or more instances of a role.
Windows Azure supports two types of roles: A web role-customized for web application programming, and supported by IIS 7 and ASP.NET. These Web roles run in integrated pipeline mode on an IIS 7Hosted Web Core. A worker role is used for generalized development, and may perform background processing for a web role.
A service may be comprised of one or both types of roles, and may include multiple roles of each type. For more information about designing and developing roles, see Building Windows Azure Services.
Storage Services
The Windows Azure storage services provide persistent, durable storage in the cloud. The fundamental storage services include:
- Binary Large Object (BLOB) service for storing text or binary data
- Queue service, for reliable, persistent messaging between services
- Table service, for structured storage that can be queried
- Windows Azure Drive that allows Windows Azure applications to mount a Page Blob, which is a single volume NTFS VHD. This allows applications to upload/download VHDs via blobs.
The Windows Azure SDK offers a REST API and a managed API for working with the storage services. You may access the storage services from within a service running in Windows Azure or directly over the Internet from any application that can send and receive data over HTTP/HTTPS.
For more information about the REST API for the storage services, see Windows Azure Storage Services REST API Reference. For information about the managed API for the storage services, see Windows Azure Managed Library Reference.
Content Distribution Network (CDN)
The Windows Azure content delivery network (CDN) enhances end user performance and reliability by placing copies of data closer to the user. A user accesses a proximate copy of the data as opposed to having to access a set of central servers. The Windows Azure CDN supports HTTP delivery of public content stored in Windows Azure storage. Content types include web objects (e.g. JPG, CSS, and JavaScript), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents) and other components for Internet delivery.
Benefits of the CDN include better performance and user experience for end users who are farther from the source of the content, and are using applications where many ‘internet trips’ are required to complete the loading of a WEB page, and large distributed scale to better handle instantaneous high load, say at the start an event such as a product launch.
More information.
More information.
Development Experience
The Windows Azure SDK provides a simulated environment for developing and testing services on the developer's local computer. The development environment includes the following tools:
- Development storage offers local storage services that simulate the Blob, Queue, and Table services available in Windows Azure. The development storage UI provides a means to view the status of the local storage services and to start, stop, and reset them. For details, see Using Development Storage.
- The development fabric simulates Windows Azure on the user's local computer. The development fabric UI provides a means to view service deployments and role instances, start and stop a service, and test logging levels. For details, see Using the Development Fabric.
Developers can use the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio® to build, package, and run services from within Visual Studio. The Windows Azure Tools also provide project templates for designing roles and configuring your service. The tools are available as a separate download and are not included as part of this SDK. The Windows Azure Portal is an administrative portal for managing your account and deploying, managing, and monitoring your Windows Azure services.
Compute Instance Sizes:
Developers have the ability to choose the size of VMs to run their application based on the applications resource requirements. Windows Azure compute instances come in four unique sizes to enable complex applications and workloads.
| Compute Instance Size | CPU | Memory | Instance Storage | I/O Performance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 1.6 GHz | 1.75 GB | 225 GB | Moderate |
| Medium | 2 x 1.6 GHz | 3.5 GB | 490 GB | High |
| Large | 4 x 1.6 GHz | 7 GB | 1,000 GB | High |
| Extra large | 8 x 1.6 GHz | 14 GB | 2,040 GB | High |
Each Windows Azure compute instance represents a virtual server. Although many resources are dedicated to a particular instance, some resources associated to I/O performance, such as network bandwidth and disk subsystem, are shared among the compute instances on the same physical host. During periods when a shared resource is not fully utilized, you are able to utilize a higher share of that resource.
The different instance types will provide different minimum performance from the shared resources depending on their size. Compute instance sizes with a high I/O performance indicator as noted in the table above will have a larger allocation of the shared resources. Having a larger allocation of the shared resource will also result in more consistent I/O performance.
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