Windows Azure (WA) platform is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment. It provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manages web applications on the internet through Microsoft datacenters. It is also a flexible platform that supports multiple languages and integrates with your existing on-premises environment. To build applications and services on WA, developers can use their existing Microsoft visual studio expertise. In addition, WA supports popular standards, protocols and languages including SOAP, REST, XML, Java, PHP and Ruby. And also it handles load balancing, resource management and life cycle management of a cloud service based on requirements that the owner of the service established. A developer who wishes to deploy an application to WA specifies the service topology, including the number of instances to deploy and any configuration settings. WA deploys the service and manages upgrades and failures to maintain availability.
Building a WA application looks much like building a traditional Windows application and it supports both .NET applications and applications built using unmanaged code. WA provides Visual Studio 2008 project templates for creating Web roles, Worker roles, and applications that combine the two. One obvious difference is that WA applications don’t run locally. Thus, to mitigate that challenge development fabric, a version of the WA environment that runs on a developer’s machine, plays the role,. The development fabric runs on a single machine running either Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista.
