Azure Services Platform
October 31st, 2008
As everybody must already know, Microsoft annouced on PDC2008 it’s new cloud services platform called Azure Services Platform:
What is it?
Azure Services Platform (or just Azure) is a group of cloud technologies, at the moment composed by an Operating System (Windows Azure) and a set of services (.Net Services, SQL Services, Live Services, Sharepoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services).
Azure was built flexible enough to allow the two possible scenarios: Building new applications to be run in the cloud; Enhance already existing applications (web, desktop and mobile) by consuming cloud services.
Azure makes all this services available through open, standard, interoperable protocols such as HTTP, REST, SOAP, etc. This enables end users and both Microsoft and non-Microsoft programming languages to consume this services. In the near future also non Microsoft development environments will be released (such as Eclipse!).
Before getting deeper with each of the services provided, remember you can start coding and using this platform yourself!
- A good place to start coding is the Azure Training Kit: download it here.
- And a good technical overview of the hole platform can read from David Chappell White Paper: Introducing the Azure Services: download it here.
To know each service a bit deeper you can check my other posts:
Windows Azure:
http://blogs.southworks.net/matiasb/2008/11/08/windows-azure
.Net Services:
http://blogs.southworks.net/matiasb/2008/11/08/net-services/
SQL Services:
http://blogs.southworks.net/matiasb/2008/11/08/sql-services
Live Services:
http://blogs.southworks.net/matiasb/2008/11/08/live-services/