Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, run-time, and control environment for the Azure Services Platform.

Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft® data centers.

Windows Azure is not grid computing, packaged software, or a standard hosting service. It is an integrated development, service hosting and management environment maintained at Microsoft datacenters. This environment includes a robust and efficient core of compute and simple storage capabilities and support for a rich variety of development tools and protocols.

Windows Azure is designed from the ground up to be a fault-tolerant platform. Innovative technology called the Fabric Controller ensures that service availability is not affected even if individual servers fail. The Fabric Controller technology also makes it possible for developers to upgrade their application without any service interruption.

The innovative Fabric Controller technology in Windows Azure enables developers to scale applications seamlessly, as demand rises and falls.

The Windows Azure Fabric is a scalable hosting environment built on distributed Microsoft data centers. The Windows Azure Fabric Controller manages resources, load balancing, and the service lifecycle based on requirements established by the developer. The Fabric Controller deploys the service and manages upgrades and failures to maintain availability.

During the Community Technology Preview (CTP) developers invited to the program, which includes all attendees of the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC), receive free trial access to the Azure Services Platform SDK, a rich set of cloud-optimized modular components including Windows Azure, SQL Azure Database, Live Services, and .NET Services, as well as the ability to host their finished application or service in Microsoft datacenters.

No. Each Windows platform is optimized for different customer scenarios and needs. The availability of both Windows Server and Windows Azure provides flexibility and choice for our customers to build applications on the Microsoft platform that best fits their needs.

The recommendation depends on the customer’s needs and the scenarios they are trying to address. If customers are interested in extending their infrastructure without having to invest in additional IT assets, need a platform as a test-bed for next generation applications, or want to extend on-premises applications in the cloud, we recommend utilizing the Azure Services Platform in concert with the existing on-premises technologies.

Windows Azure and Windows Server are separate platforms designed to integrate easily so that customers have a choice about the platform that most directly addresses their business needs. Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that enables customers to create scalable and available web applications; While Windows Server addresses the on-premises and hosting market. Going forward, Windows Azure and Windows Server will share innovations bilaterally.

No. Windows Azure is not the same as Windows Server. They are separate Microsoft platforms. Microsoft will continue to invest heavily, to innovate and to ship new versions of Windows Server. Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that reduces the barriers to creating scalable and available web applications. The availability of Windows Azure and Windows Server provides flexibility and choice for customers to build on the Microsoft platform for either their on-premise or cloud applications.

Yes. Although separate platforms, we have explicitly designed them to so that customers can choose the platform that most directly addresses their application and business needs.

Applications certified for Windows Server will not run on Windows Azure unless the ISV or developer ports the code. We have worked hard to ensure that applications built on .NET and some unmanaged code applications can be ported to Windows Azure. We will continue to evaluate this process based on beta testing feedback.

Windows Azure Storage Service is designed to be the lowest cost, most efficient solution for large scale data storage and retrieval in the cloud. It can store blobs, queues, and simple tables (non-relational). SQL Azure is designed to bring the power of relational databases into the cloud and will provide rich querying over tables.

Developers have the ability to sign-up for the compute, storage, and hosting services provided by Windows Azure without signing up for other Azure Services Platform services.

Developers have access to a suite of readiness resources including Prescriptive Architecture Guidance, virtual hands-on labs, webcasts, and documentation. And support during the CTP period is provided through developer-to-developer blogs and forums.

Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, and XML. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. Windows Azure welcomes third party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

To build applications and services on Windows Azure, Developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 expertise. Windows Azure supports standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, and XML. This enables developers to integrate applications with Windows Azure, whether you use Microsoft or non-Microsoft tools and technologies.

The built-in management services in Windows Azure provide developers control and visibility to stay focused on what they do best - create and deliver killer applications online. Developers can specify the performance level and parameters of their applications in Windows Azure.

Advanced tracing and logging functionality exposed in the Windows Azure portal allows developers to monitor compute, storage, and bandwidth. This enables developers to ensure performance while paying only for resources that their application consumes.

Microsoft .NET Services are a suite of web services for customers with integration and business-to-business collaboration requirements; the services offered include access control and service bus connectivity, and all run from the Azure Services Platform.

The Service Bus service enables secure connectivity between services and applications behind firewall or network boundaries, facilitating cross-organizational communication. Additionally the service bus allows service functionality to be exposed easily and consumed from other applications in a loosely coupled manner using a variety of communication patterns.

The Access Control service provides an enterprise-class mechanism for enforcing access control rules and authorization as a web service. It supports federated scenarios to support enforcement of access control rules where users may come from multiple organizations or utilize different identification protocols.

.NET Services are intended for enterprise developers, ISVs and systems integration partners. While enterprise customers can use these services to augment on-premises assets with cloud computing and services, they are also applicable to ISVs and service providers selling solutions to consumers and business customers and to small to medium sized business customers and Web 2.0 start ups who need on-demand cloud computing in a pay-as-you-consume model business model.

The Access Control Service can federate with third party identity providers, allowing for the handling of identities from existing systems and from different organizations. With its federation capabilities the Access Control Service can federate with Active Directory to use existing identities and enforce claims based access control.

The .NET Access Control Service provides authorization capabilities as a hosted offering relieving developers from having to build access control into their applications, something particularly problematic when applications extend beyond traditional organizational boundaries to integrate with external services. In addition, the service's federation capabilities ensure that user identities from many different organizations are supported. The Access Control Service is based on powerful, secure and standards based infrastructure and can be used on its own it but also supports other services such as the Service Bus.

The Service Bus is a standards based, Internet scale messaging system that enables developers to connect applications, systems and people across firewalls.

Applications frequently need to connect or integrate with other applications and services to create what are called composite applications. Creating an infrastructure to facilitate this type of communication involves significant challenges related to authentication, naming, and secure cross organizational firewall traversal. The .NET Service Bus provides a hosted, secure, standards-based infrastructure that dramatically reduces the barriers to applications communicating across systems and organizational boundaries.

Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on Microsoft’s Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities in cloud as web-based services. It enables you to store data from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents. SQL Azure will deliver a rich set of integrated services for relational database, search, reporting, and analytics and data synchronization with mobile users, remote offices and business partners. The first of these SQL Services announced at PDC 2008 as technology preview was database service called SQL Data Services. Other services will be available in future. http://www.microsoft.com/sql/dataservices/default.mspx

Following a CTP announcement of SQL Azure Database at PDC 2008 there has been a large quantity of valuable customer feedback through forums, blogs and posts. Based on the customer needs and requirements, our roadmap is now focused on empowering the Microsoft Azure Platform, by delivering a traditional relational database service in the cloud, supporting Transact-SQL (T-SQL) over TDS (Tabular Data Stream) protocol. With this evolution, SQL Azure Database will provide customers with the ability to use existing investments in T-SQL development and use a relational data model in the cloud. In addition to this, SQL Azure Database also provides a stronger value proposition through savings in the cost of development by enabling the ability to use existing applications/tools and knowledge, while benefitting from the new distributed, cloud based functionality.

At PDC 2008 customers were offered a flexible entity-based data model that did not provide schema support and exposed only minimal relational capabilities. After many customers reviews and based on significant customer feedback the SQL Azure Database capabilities are evolving to provide customers with the ability to utilize a traditional RDBMS data model in a cloud-based environment. Developers will be able to use existing programming interfaces and apply existing investments in development, training, and tools to build their applications along with current advantages of high availability, scale, utility and cost.

SQL Azure Database will provide a unique relational database service value-add to the Azure Services Platform. This strategy enables customers to use a database service for their applications built on the Azure Services Platform.

With the move to a T-SQL based relational data model, SQL Azure Database will not support the current SOAP and REST based Authority-Container-Entity (ACE) programming model. Based on extensive feedback from our early adopter customers and partners, most customers will greatly benefit from the relational capabilities in SQL Azure Database and will continue to develop their applications against this. Customers who wish to expose REST access to their SQL Azure data can easily do so by building custom services with ADO.NET Data Services. On the other hand, customers who wish to use a REST based programming model and whose needs are met with non-relational simple structured data storage have the option of using Windows Azure storage.

SQL Azure Database will target the following audiences:

• Small to medium sized businesses, Web 2.0 and ASP.NET developers that require a pay-as-you-grow, secure, scalable and highly available database service with business continuity and minimal infrastructure cost.
• Business SaaS ISVs building multi-tenant LOB applications for businesses that require enterprise class scale, reliability, availability and data protection.

• Workgroup applications (i.e. small branch and departmental applications).
• Web 2.0 and ASP.NET apps built on the Azure Services platform that require relational database services (i.e. Cloud-applications hosted in the Azure platform)
• Business ISVs building multitenant SaaS-type LOB applications like PLM, content/record management, digital asset management that require massive scale and enterprise class availability and data protection.
• SQL Azure Database will also enable new application scenarios for enterprise businesses such as central, cloud-based repository of data to be accessed by multiple users on multiple devices from anywhere and kept in sync with on-premises data sources and clients.

In its initial release, SQL Azure Database will support relational capabilities suitable for relational apps, including multi-tenant apps requiring large levels of scale. Future releases will support features like distributed queries across partitions.

SQL Azure Database will continue to be built on the proven SQL Server technology foundation and architecture, which offers reliability, availability and enterprise-level security features. By harnessing these capabilities SQL Azure Database will offer a business-ready service level agreement that provides built-in data replication for automatic high-availability and backups for business continuity in the unlikely event of a failure.

SQL Server is still the architectural foundation for SQL Azure Database. It is the language and protocol supported by the service endpoint that has changed. The flexible Authority, Container, Entity (ACE) data model has been replaced with a relational data model accessed by customer’s applications via T-SQL over TDS. This change delivers a familiar development experience for our customers currently using an on-premises SQL Server database, and in turn enables them to use existing knowledge, skills, tools, and applications.

Previously, SQL Azure Database supported a flexible, Entity based data model. After getting valuable customer feedback it was apparent that there was a need for a fully relational data model in the cloud. SQL Azure Database represents the move from the ACE programming model to a relational data model with many familiar SQL Server-like programming concepts. Developers will be able to utilize existing Transact-SQL code to access their data in the cloud. They will also create and modify applications that utilize existing Transact-SQL code to interact with the fully relational cloud database service. In addition, they can expose REST and SOAP services on top of their data easily using existing data access frameworks, such as ADO.NET Data Services.

SQL Azure Database is built on SQL Server database technologies, used for running mission-critical applications in the enterprise as well as on the Web. Since SQL Server is a broad data platform that can handle all data from birth to archival, there are many capabilities that our data platform provides. SQL Azure Database is exposing a large subset of those relational capabilities and extending them as services in the cloud in ways that make it easy for customers and partners to consume and build upon over the Internet. In addition to this, SQL Azure Database provides built-in high scale, availability, utility, and other such capabilities. Although SQL Azure Database in its first iteration exposes only the core RDBMS capabilities of what is in the full SQL Server data platform, Microsoft expects this to increase over time, with likely future features including Reporting, Analytics, ETL etc.

SQL Azure Database is a highly available, scalable, distributed database service hosted by Microsoft in the cloud. SQL Azure Database enables easy provisioning and deployment of relational database services. Developers do not have to install, setup, patch or manage any software. HA, backup and recovery, geo-distribution and disaster recovery will be built-in. With a dedicated hosted database, developers and IT Pros are still responsible for installing, setting up, updating and patching OS & database software. Additionally, hosted database solutions have to device HA, scaling out and disaster recovery solutions thus increasing total cost of administration.

SQL Azure Database services will offer a scalable distributed relational database service in the Cloud that is used for storing, processing and analyzing structured, semi-structured & unstructured data. Windows Azure Table storage is a non-relational, scalable, simple structured storage (ISAM style) in the cloud. Since SQL Azure Database will offer database service for applications developed on Windows Azure, customers can pool these services based on the needs.

With the new relational data model in SQL Azure Database, customers will be able to utilize existing tools such as Visual Studio so they can work with both on-premises SQL Server and cloud-based deployments. In addition, SQL Azure Database enabled new scenarios that will provide a seamless synchronization of data between an on-premises database and SQL Azure Database. This will enable customers to use combinations of databases on and off premises.

Business partners will continue to build multi-tenant LOB applications and use SQL Azure Database with the similar knowledge and tools as they do with on-premises SQL Server. ISVs and partners can develop and offer cloud-based services themselves, powered by SQL Azure Database and Windows Azure multi-tenant capabilities.

Yes. SQL Azure Database provides a cloud-based relational database service for Azure Services Platform. Developers who write Windows Azure applications will be able to access SQL Azure Database based on their needs.

Unlike Amazon’s SimpleDB, SQL Azure Database offers you the familiarity of developing against a traditional relational database model using T-SQL and provides you with the benefits associated with this model like powerful and familiar querying experience, tools and knowledge base.

Developers will be able to use Visual Studio to create new applications or modify existing applications to utilize SQL Azure Database. Developers can also use existing ASP.NET controls, designers, and tools to develop applications. In the future, developers will also use SQL Server Management Studio, a familiar tool for SQL Server, to access and manage their cloud-based data. In the future, SQL Azure Database will also provide tools and documentation to support additional programming languages.

Windows Azure provides storage and the ability to run ASPX files in a managed environment so you can focus on your application functionality and not on capacity planning. Microsoft Dynamics CRM currently runs on Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server; you can choose to run the application on your premises or use Microsoft on demand CRM Online.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a full suite of sales, service and marketing functionality built on a set of data and application services that can be used to build other types of business systems. CRM Services in Azure will provide building blocks that developers can use to build new applications.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be used to quickly develop and deploy business applications requiring objects with multiple data types and relational schema, customizable business logic and business intelligence. Windows Azure and the Microsoft .Net Services provide a set of low level programming interfaces for building on demand, scalable and reliable applications on the internet.

We see a limitless set of opportunities in using Azure to extend the capability of business applications built with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. For example:

• Extend the CRM user interface with custom ASPX pages within Windows Azure.
• Connect CRM to ERP systems run on premises through the Azure Service Bus.
• Develop commerce portals running on Windows Azure and pushing data into CRM Online and self hosted ERP systems using the Service Bus.

Learn more about SharePoint development on MSDN.

We have not announced the next version of SharePoint at this time.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, SharePoint Online Standard, SharePoint Online Dedicated and Office Live Labs.

Today you can write code in SharePoint that uses Web Services to make calls to Azure services. This can be achieved using out of the box SharePoint functionality like the Data View Web Part or in code using ASMX Web Services or WCF Web Services in a custom web part.

We have not announced any further detail or release dates. We expect to release more information about this soon.

These plans are still being made. We understand and respect that many customers have deployed SharePoint on premises now and we will seek to provide upgrade paths for any future SharePoint products.

We recommend that you continue to write code to the SharePoint APIs and Web Services that are available now. Learn more about SharePoint development on MSDN.

Subject to certain limits, Azure Services will be available without charge during our Community Technology Preview (CTP). Once Microsoft Azure launches for commercial use, we will offer a portfolio of services and you will be billed according to your actual consumption of each service. Based on feedback during the CTP period, pricing offers may be provided based on the following parameters.

• Windows Azure - Compute and Storage services
• .NET Services - Access Control, Service Bus, and/or Workflow Services
• SQL Azure - Database service for LOB applications
• SharePoint Services (future) - SharePoint components that developers can utilize and build into their application

Monitoring agents in the Azure platform will measure specific resource utilization. However, no specific pricing or consumption models will be announced until we have received sufficient input from the user community and partners during the CTP period. This will include:

• CPU time, measured in CPU-hours
• Bandwidth for ingress/egress from the data center, measured in GBs
• Storage, measured in GBs
• Transactions, measured as requests likes Gets & Puts

Microsoft will offer these services both a la carte as well as through our established business programs. Regardless of how you purchase Microsoft services, you will have access to our extensive field organization and our rich partner ecosystem. In addition, you will be able to get support through our standard support channels. We will also give you access to robust service level agreements and guarantees on quality of service.

• Current Timeframe – Community Technology Preview (CTP) Program
  • Explore and experiment with the Azure SDKs locally
  • Register to try the CTP.

• Availability Timeframe – H2 2009
  • Acquire directly through the Microsoft Online Customer Portal
  • Acquire though ISVs (independent software vendors): purchase an ISV application which utilizes the Azure Services Platform, and pay the ISV through their own licensing and pricing model