Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure Platform. For example, physical hardware resources are abstracted away and exposed as compute resources ready to be consumed by cloud applications. Physical storage is abstracted with storage resources and exposed through well-defined storage interfaces. A common Windows fabric abstracts the physical hardware and software platform and exposes virtualized compute and storage resources. In addition, each instance of the application is monitored for availability and scalability, and automatically managed. Windows Azure runs on machines in Microsoft data centers. The goal of Windows Azure is to provide developers with an on-demand compute and storage platform to host, scale, and manage internet or cloud applications. It’s important to note that a developer can’t supply their own VM image for Windows Azure to run. Instead, the platform itself provides and maintains its own copy of Windows. Developers focus solely on creating applications that run on Windows Azure.


Windows Azure supports a consistent development experience through its integration with Visual Studio. Windows Azure is an open platform that supports both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. Windows Azure welcomes third party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

Whatever a Windows Azure application does or whichever language it is implemented in, the platform itself provides the same fundamental components, as shown in the following figure:



As their names suggest, the Compute service runs applications while the Storage service stores data. The third component, the Windows Azure Fabric, provides a common way to manage and monitor applications that use this cloud platform. The upcoming sections introduce each of these three parts.


The following is a good overview video of Windows Azure, followed by a white paper introducting Windows Azure. In the next section, we will take a look at building an application for the cloud using Windows Azure.


Direct Download Link for the video


Introducing Windows Azure

Cloud computing is here. Running applications on machines in an Internet-accessible data center can bring plenty of advantages. Yet wherever they run, applications are built on some kind of platform. For on-premises applications, this platform usually includes an operating system, some way to store data, and perhaps more. Applications running in the cloud need a similar foundation. The goal of Microsoft’s Windows Azure is to provide this. Part of the larger Windows Azure platform, Windows Azure is a platform for running Windows applications and storing data in the cloud.