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.
Windows Azure is currently in Community Technology Preview. Commercial availability for Windows Azure will likely be at the end of calendar year 2009.
Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.
Use Windows Azure to:
- Add Web service capabilities to existing packaged applications
- Build, modify, and distribute applications to the Web with minimal on-premises resources
- Perform services (large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations, etc.) off premises
- Create, test, debug, and distribute Web services quickly and inexpensively
- Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources
- Reduce the effort and costs of IT management
Choice. Windows Azure reduces obstacles to creating reliable and scalable web applications because it is based on, and works with familiar Microsoft technology including ASP.NET, IIS, FastCGI, .NET Full Trust, P/Invoke, and Visual Studio 2008, so developers can use their existing skills to efficiently create, test, deploy, and manage web services. Windows Azure supports standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.
Low Risk. Windows Azure provides a scalable platform and a rich development environment that allows developers to focus on the business logic of the application, without worrying about operational constraints.
Fewer Distractions. The Fabric Controller technology in Windows Azure, enables you to scale applications seamlessly, as demand rises and falls. The built-in management services give monitoring and tracing capabilities, and allow you to stay focused on what you do best—create and deliver services and applications online.
Computation Services
- Ability to run Microsoft ASP.NET Web applications or .NET code in the cloud
- Service hosting environment that includes Internet Information Services 7.0 and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
- Security supported by flexible Code Access Security policies
- Small runtime API that supports logging and local scratch storage
- Web portal that helps you deploy, scale, and upgrade your services quickly and easily
- FastCGI, a protocol for interfacing applications to web servers, which will allow customers to deploy and run web applications written with non-Microsoft programming languages such as PHP (Developers will be responsible for including the relevant runtime libraries for these languages when deploying applications.)
- .NET Full Trust to allow usage of additional .NET features such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
- From Full Trust .NET, developers can call into unmanaged DLLs
Simple data storage services
- Blobs, tables, and queues hosted in the cloud, close to your computation
- Authenticated access and triple replication to help keep your data safe
- Easy access to data with simple REST interfaces, available remotely and from the data center
Development Tools
- Complete offline development environment, including computation and storage services
- Complete command-line SDK tools and samples
- Visual Studio add-in that enables local debugging
- New SDK Download: a new version of the Windows Azure SDK will be available for download at a time to coincide with the MIX09 conference, which will enable developers to take advantage of the new features offered by Windows Azure, as well as an update to the Visual Studio add-ins.
- Windows Azure PDC 2008 Resources:
- Download the Windows Azure SDK
- Download the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio
- MSDN Forum: Windows Azure
- Frequently Asked Questions
