Meet Windows Azure: Microsoft’s cloud services platform
Posted on | November 4, 2008 |
The next big thing in computing we are hearing these days is “cloud computing“. Every computing infrastructure vendor is announcing their range of “cloud services” offerings, or is charting their strategy to offer one. A couple of days back at Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Microsoft announced their plans about Windows Azure - An internet scale services platform hosted in their data centers.
According to a 2008 paper published by IEEE Internet Computing “Cloud Computing is a paradigm in which information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks, wall computers, handhelds, sensors, monitors, etc.”
The Windows Azure services stack is a composite framework consisting computation services, simple data storage services and development tools to build Azure applications.
What does Windows Azure have in store for developers?
- Computation services
- Ability to run .Net apps in the cloud
- Cloud hosting included. (IIS7 with .Net 3.5 SP1)
- Minimal API with logging and small local storage.
- Web based management portal to deploy, upgrade and scale your cloud instance.
- Data Storage services
- Blobs, Tables, Queues hosted in the cloud along with the app.
- Easy access to date with RESTful interfaces.
- Authentication of data and fully replicated storage.
- Development tools
- Complete SDK with code samples.
- Complete offline cloud environment (Similar to Google Appengine’s local SDK environment)
Meanwhile the pioneers of commercially available cloud computing infrastructure, Amazon announced maturity of their EC2 range of cloud offerings with SLAs and few more goodies.
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April 13th, 2010 @ 5:51 pm
i m doing seminar on windows azure so need t papers plz do t needful