Windows Azure – The Microsoft Cloud

Marat Bakirov

Cloud computing and services is obviously a modern trend. We can speculate a lot about pros and cons, but there is an obvious advantage – instant scalability, allowing customers to increase or decrease service capacity with a single click.

We will shortly cover 4 main pillars of Microsoft Cloud platform – Windows Azure, Live Services, .NET Services, and SQL Azure, bringing main attention to Windows Azure.

Windows Azure is a framework and a service that allows you to run your ASP.NET and PHP applications with instant and infinite scalability. For this you have to follow the developer pattern we will cover.

We will cover specific API’s for working in a cloud, and a specific Azure storage – durable, scalable and highly available REST based storage in the cloud. Thus you will know everything to run your app in Windows Azure.

Keywords: Cloud computing, Azure, Microsoft.

Marat Bakirov

Bio

Started IT career in 1999. During career mostly used C++, .NET and Java. Took part in 2003 in creation of www.timus.ru portal. During 2004-2006 worked as developer, software architect and team leader at x-tensive (www.x-tensive.com), took part in DataObjects.NET and mescontrol.net projects.

Microsoft employee since 2007. Current position – Community Developer Evangelist at DPE (Developer and Platform Evangelism) department. Works with developer communities over Russia.