Windows Azure™ is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft® datacenters.
Windows Azure is a flexible platform that supports multiple languages and integrates with your existing on-premises environment. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio® expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.
Use Windows Azure to:
- Run enterprise workloads in the cloud
- Build, modify, and distribute scalable applications with minimal on-premises resources
- Perform large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations
- Create, test, debug, and distribute Web services quickly and inexpensively
Windows Azure Benefits
- Bring your ideas to market faster and pay as you go
- Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources
- Reduce the effort and costs of IT management
- Respond quickly to changes in your business and customer needs
- Choose an on-premises or off-premises deployment model that best suits your needs.
- Scale your IT resources up and down based on your needs.
- Consume computing resources ONLY when the needs arise.
- Focus less energy on managing operational resources and constraints.
- Remove the need to manage hardware
- Use your existing development skills to build cloud applications
- Consistent development and management experience across on-premises and the cloud.
Customer Success Stories with Windows Azure
Windows Azure Features
Learn more about Windows Azure on MSDN
Computation
- 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, Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0
- 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 support allows customers to deploy and run web applications written with non-Microsoft programming languages such as PHP
- .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
- 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
- Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 to enable the creation, building, debugging, running and packaging of scalable web applications and services on Windows Azure.
Ways to get started with the Windows Azure Platform
New to Windows Azure? Learn about what you can accomplish here
Ready to start building with Windows Azure? Download free Tools & SDK
Need to know pricing? Compare all of our platform packages
Get Started Now
Three easy steps:- Learn about Windows Azure here
- Download the Training Kit
- Review Windows Azure pricing
