The Windows® Azure™ Platform offers a flexible, familiar environment for developers to create cloud applications and services. With the Windows Azure platform, you can shorten your time to market and adapt as demand for your service grows.
The Windows Azure Platform includes a set of cloud computing services that can be used together or independently. These include: Windows Azure, Microsoft SQL Azure and Windows Azure Platform AppFabric.
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.
Developers can use the Windows Azure to:
- Run legacy processes in the cloud.
- Build, modify, and distribute applications that take advantage of Microsoft datacenters’ capacity to scale.
- Perform large-volume storage, batch processing, and intense or large-volume computations
- Create, test, debug, and distribute Web services quickly and inexpensively.
- Create hybrid solutions that combines Windows Azure with your on-premise resources
Windows Azure has several advantages over using on-premise infrastructure. You can bring your ideas to market faster, start small, and pay as you go. You’ll reduce the need to manage hardware and IT. You can scale your IT resources up and down based on your needs so that you don’t end up paying for unneeded resources.
To learn more, visit the Windows Azure home page
