Summary
This chapter introduced Windows Azure, the cloud offering from Microsoft. It described the author's first contact with "cloud" in general and the history of the platform, and how Microsoft decided to put a great amount of effort in realizing Windows Azure.
A first deployment of a MVC3 website to Windows Azure was demonstrated. After the first deployment, we took a deep dive in the internals of Windows Azure and we saw in great detail how the platform actually works and how availability and fault-tolerance is maintained.
The next section is about the core concepts of Windows Azure. It provides an overview of the different features, providing a high-level description of the offerings.
The next chapter describes a fictitious startup company with a new idea for social networking. Throughout this book, this scenario of the next-gen social network will be used for code snippets and how to use different Windows Azure features related to this scenario.
