The Azure™ Services Platform is designed to help developers quickly and easily create, deploy, manage, and distribute web services and applications on the Internet. Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management 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.

Microsoft .NET Services are a set of Microsoft-hosted, highly scalable, developer-oriented services that provide key building blocks required by many cloud-based and cloud-aware applications. Much like the .NET Framework provides higher-level class libraries that make developers more productive, .NET Services enables a developer to focus on their application logic rather than building and deploying their own cloud-based infrastructure services.

The Micosoft .NET Access Control Service provides an easy way to control web applications and services while integrating with standards-based identity providers, including enterprise directories and web identity systems such as Windows Live ID. Authorization decisions can be pulled out of the application and into a set of declarative rules that can transform incoming security claims into claims that applications understand.

The Microsoft .NET Service Bus makes it easy to connect applications together over the Internet. Services that register on the Bus can easily be discovered and accessed, across any network topology. The Service Bus provides the familiar Enterprise Service Bus application pattern, while helping to solve some of the hard issues that arise when implementing this pattern across network, security, and organizational boundaries, at Internet-scale.

Microsoft® SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. SQL Azure will deliver a rich set of integrated services that you can use to perform relational queries, search, reporting, analytics, integration and synchronize data with mobile users, remote offices and business partners. Currently, SQL Azure offers relational database service called Microsoft® SQL Azure Database. Other services will be available in future.

Microsoft SQL Azure Database offers highly scalable and Internet-facing distributed database services in the cloud for storing and processing relational queries. SQL Azure Database can help you develop and provision new applications quickly with REST-based and SOAP based web protocols. The services are built on robust SQL Server Database and Windows Server technologies, providing high availability and security.

Live Services is a set of building blocks within the Azure Services Platform for handling user data and application resources. Live Services provides developers with an easy on-ramp to build rich social applications and experiences, across a range of digital devices that can connect with one of the largest audiences on the Web.

Live Services consists of:

• Mesh Services - makes it possible to build applications that span across digital devices and the web and enables data synchronization across services, applications and devices.
  • Devices
  • Synchronization
  • Application Management
• Identity Services
• Directory Services
• User-Data Storage Services
• Communications and Presence Services
• Search Services
• Geospatial Services

In the future, developers will have access to functionality from Microsoft SharePoint® Services in the Azure Services Platform. With the flexibility to use familiar developer tools like Microsoft Visual Studio, developers will be able to rapidly build applications that use SharePoint capabilities as building blocks for their own applications. Developers can expect a breadth of SharePoint capabilities across the spectrum of on-premises and online applications using the Azure Services Platform.

In the future, developers will have access to Microsoft Dynamics® CRM functionality in the Azure Services Platform. With the flexibility to use familiar developer tools like Visual Studio, developers will be able to rapidly build applications that use Microsoft Dynamics CRM capabilities as building blocks for their own applications. Developers can expect a breadth of Microsoft Dynamics CRM capabilities across the spectrum of on-premises and online applications using the Azure Services Platform.