Windows Azure

The service offering that has commonly been referred to as Azure is actually Windows Azure. For the rest of this book, when we refer to Azure, we'll call it Windows Azure.

Windows Azure is just what it sounds like–it is the operating system part of the cloud, with a few other features. The most inflexible part of the Azure universe is the fact that Windows Azure is not designed to provide customized virtual machines; (custom VHDs are a newly announced offering at PDC10, but are a different service than Windows Azure) we are limited to a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008. We can create VMs of different sizes (the sizes relate to costs), and the OS is highly configurable, but it must remain Windows.

Windows Azure encompasses two areas of functionality–the compute service and the storage service. The next diagram shows how these services fit into the Azure universe. Additionally, there is an Azure Fabric Agent that connects the VM to the rest of the cloud. The Fabric Controller...