In our earlier articles on Learn Cloud Computing with Windows Azure, we have get some fair idea on the Cloud computing and different types of cloud with the cloud terminologies. Now we are going to see how Windows Azure sits in Cloud out of the different service models, Windows Azure fits in with the Platform as a Service model, where Microsoft Windows Azure plays a major role for developing application over the cloud platform. Windows Azure is the cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. [more]
Windows Azure provides you on-demand compute & storage to host, scale, and manage web applications and services on the internet in Microsoft data centers. Windows Azure platform makes it easy for the developers to build a productive business application without taking much of the resources to build an environment which is generally required to manage and host the application. It offers a very simple yet productive platform for the application development over the web and the services required operating the application based on the business.
As per MSDN, Windows Azure platform is
Windows Azure platform is an Internet-scale computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The Windows Azure platform includes the foundation layer of Windows Azure as well as a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. The following illustration shows the products and components that are part of the Windows Azure platform.
Figure 1 – Azure Platform
Windows Azure operates on top of the .Net framework, where we use the core components to build the application on top of the cloud platform. As the traditional application development we can use the Visual Studio IDE as the forefront to start developing the web application, but to develop on top of the Azure Platform we need to have some set of tools that are required to start developing with Visual Studio IDE which we will see while installing the required SDK’s that are basically required to start developing the application.
Azure and its Components:
As we already seen what Azure is from Microsoft and how the platform supports the application development over the cloud to host the application. Windows Azure platform is a building block of number of component that are much required to run the application as we have seen in the Figure 2 we can say that Windows Azure runs over the Compute, Storage and the Appfabric as the primary. We will see in depth on each of the component and the building blocks for Azure Platform in our next tutorial.
