Overview

A platform to extend on-premise solutions to cloud or develop & deploy custom solutions on cloud. It runs on Microsoft Infrastructure.

There are mainly three components of Azure Services Platform:

1.    Windows Azure – A cloud operating system.

2.    Set of Developer Services that can be integrated into on-premise or cloud software systems.

3.    Cloud Applications which are ready to consume by customers.

 

Windows Azure

·         Development, service hosting and service management environment.

·         An open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments.

·         Runtime Capabilities: ASP.NET, IIS 7.0, .NET 3.5 SP1

·         Admin Web Portal to deploy, scale and upgrade services.

·         Storage Capabilities: Data storage for tables, etc is available which supports authentication, replication and REST based interfaces.

·         Development Tools: Visual Studio remains the IDE for development on Windows Azure. Complete offline development environment available including runtime and storage capabilities.

Developer Services

·         Set of ready to integrate services like Live Services, SQL Services, .NET Services, Sharepoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services from Microsoft.

·         They are exposed as web services and can be integrated into both cloud and on-premise applications.

·         Live Services: Windows Live Platform exposed as a service. This can be used to build rich social applications and integrated with Windows Live user and application management features.

·         SQL Services: Web based distributed relational database. It can store and retrieve structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Supports relational queries, search and data synchronization. Supports REST and SOAP protocols.

·         .NET Services: Provides building block services for cloud applications. Services are exposed as REST, SOAP and HTTP interfaces. The three main services exposed are Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow Service.

·         Sharepoint Services: Sharepoint capabilities exposed as a service.

·         Dynamics CRM Services: Dynamics CRM capabilities exposed as a service.

Microsoft Cloud Applications

A set of ready to use hosted Microsoft products:

·         Windows Live

·         Office Live

·         Exchange Online

·         Sharepoint Online

·         Dynamics CRM Online