What does this technology do?

In this section, we will drill down deeper into three key aspects of the Windows Azure platform—Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and Windows Azure AppFabric.

Windows Azure

Windows Azure is the operating system in the cloud. It supports hosting a piece of application code in disparate Microsoft data centers, while automatically making it highly available, scalable, on-demand, and accessible from a set of clients over the Internet. This application does not have to be web-centric as it could be any piece of code that can be hosted in Windows Azure—for example, it can be a piece of unmanaged code that uses a computation-intensive algorithm and operates without an HTTP face. The platform allows non-Microsoft languages and supports popular standards, languages, and protocols such as SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.

Usage

Windows Azure provides a familiar development and deployment environment to build and scale-out applications. Essentially, the platform builds on a set of three...