What is Windows Azure

Developers can use the cloud to deploy and run applications and to store data. On-premises applications can still use cloud–based resources. For example, an application located on an on-premises server, a rich client that runs on a desktop computer, or one that runs on a mobile device can use storage that is located on the cloud.
Windows Azure abstracts hardware resources through virtualization. Each application that is deployed to Windows Azure runs on one or more Virtual Machines (VMs). These deployed applications behave as though they were on a dedicated computer, although they might share physical resources such as disk space, network I/O, or CPU cores with other VMs on the same physical host. A key benefit of an abstraction layer above the physical hardware is portability and scalability. Virtualizing a service allows it to be moved to any number of physical hosts in the data center. By combining virtualization technologies, commodity hardware, multi-tenancy, and aggregation of demand, Microsoft can achieve economies of scale. These generate higher data center utilization (that is, more useful work-per-dollar hardware cost) and, subsequently, savings that are passed along to you.
Virtualization also allows you to have both vertical scalability and horizontal scalability. Vertical scalability means that, as demand increases, you can increase the number of resources, such as CPU cores or memory, on a specific VM. Horizontal scalability means that you can add more instances of VMs that are copies of existing services. All these instances are load balanced at the network level so that incoming requests are distributed among them.
At the time of this writing, the Windows Azure platform includes two main components: Windows Azure itself and Windows Azure SQL Database.
Windows Azure provides a Microsoft Windows® Server-based computing environment for applications and persistent storage for both structured and unstructured data, as well as asynchronous messaging. It also provides a range of services that help you to connect users and on-premises applications to cloud hosted applications, manage authentication, and implement data management and related features such as caching.
Windows Azure SQL Databaseis essentially SQL Server® provided as a service in the cloud.
Windows Azure also includes a range of management services that allow you to control all these resources, either through a web-baseduser interface (a web portal) or programmatically. In most cases there is a REST-based API that can be used to define how your services will work. Most management tasks that can be performed through the web portal can also be achieved using the API.
Finally, there is a comprehensive set of tools and software development kits (SDKs) that allow you to develop, test, and deploy your applications. For example, you can develop and test your applications in a simulated local environment, provided by the Compute Emulator and the Storage Emulator. Most tools are also integrated into development environments such as Microsoft Visual Studio. In addition, there are third-party management tools available.

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