Public Cloud provided by service providers offers customers the ability to deploy and consume services. In this category, Azure™ is a highly scalable services platform providing pay–as-you-go flexibility delivered from Microsoft’s datacenters.
Windows Azure
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.
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
Microsoft Cloud Continuum
Benefits
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.
Click here to get detailed information and resources on Windows Azure.
Public Cloud Hosters Offering
As organizations look to take advantage of the public cloud today through utilizing the services offered by hosters, it is important that those hosters are able to deliver that value rapidly. Hosters are now able to take advantage of Microsoft’s proven technology platform, best practices, and experience to build their public cloud offerings.
Utilizing this flexible and familiar platform, hosters will be able to increase the range of services they can offer to include supporting scenarios such as:
Test and development environments without the need for capital expenditure
Dynamic capacity addition to enable IT to rapidly respond to changes in demand
Low cost disaster avoidance with hosted DR environments
Microsoft enables the hosters to offer public cloud today through the existing Microsoft technologies and environments they know and trust. Capabilities such as Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, proven development environments, to System Center and Forefront, all are leveraged to deliver the public cloud, without introducing the additional complexity of unproven technologies.
Microsoft is further enabling hosters to offer public cloud with the introduction of the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Hosters. It is a free, extensible toolkit that enables you to provide virtualized IT infrastructure and managed services to your customers. You will get:
Step-by-step instructions that you can use to build instantly scalable virtualized infrastructure.
Sample code and best practices.
Marketing collateral to help you market and sell managed services.
Download the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Hosters today.
