New features and enhancements in Windows Server 2012 can offer your organization even greater application flexibility. Build and deploy applications and web sites on-premises, in the cloud and in a hybrid environment, using a consistent set of tools and frameworks.
Build and Deploy Applications Across Premises
As a developer or IT Professional, you need to think about how to build and deploy next-generation applications, many of which will be cloud applications. With Windows Server 2012 you can enable hybrid applications to run in private, hosted, and Windows Azure public clouds, or across premises. For example, developers may want to run applications that they developed for Azure on premises. Programming symmetry and common development tools between Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure can help achieve this goal. And virtual machine portability increases your flexibility even further by giving you the ability to leverage infrastructure on your terms.
Maximize Resource Utilization
Whether you are a cloud provider or part of an internal IT department, you are probably expected to meet aggressive service level expectations of application owners and their end users, both with respect to the performance and the provisioning and scaling of applications and web sites. And to get the most scale out of your hardware investments, it is important to make optimal use of hardware capabilities to maximize the utilization of resources. Windows Server 2012 offers new and enhanced features, for example support for NUMA-aware applications, that provide extensive support for improving website and application density that enable you to increase the number of sites and applications supported with the same amount of computer hardware. Windows Server 2012 also delivers robust support for multitenant websites and applications, including features that simplify management across tenants, such as support for a centralized SSL certificate store.
Reuse Development Skills and Knowledge
The reuse of existing development skills and knowledge provides for a significant productivity advantage as you look at rolling out new applications. Reducing restrictions on application development and runtime requirements, combined with improvements in interoperability enables more flexibility to implement new applications in less time and with less risk. The new .NET Framework 4.5 offers core new features and improvements, such as support for asynchronous file operations, and provides great capabilities for developers working on rapidly scaling, fast-time-to-market applications and cloud services. In addition to being the best platform for the .NET framework, Windows Server 2012 provides a single, agile platform for both open-source software and ASP.NET, which allows developers to freely choose from multiple programming stacks and languages, including .NET, PHP, Node.js, and Python.