Window Azure

Window Azure is the new buzzword recently from Microsoft. It's just a platform to host and run application at Microsoft data centres. Thus, cutting the needs to maintain and invest in your own hardware.

Load balancing, workflow, SQL data services , Live/Active Directory authentication are part of the hosting package. There is 5 services that developers can develop application on that run in the cloud - Live Services, .Net Services, SQL Services, SharePoint and Microsoft CRM.



Microsoft Definition:
The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together.

The other benefit is scale-as-you-go. Imagine you develop an apps and released to production (deployed to Azure Services Platform). The customer response is surging and your site can't cope with the traffic.

If the apps is hosted in Window Azure platform, a flip of switch ( change of config file instance properties from 1 -> 200) will enable your app instances to increase to what is specified.



However, cloud computing is not new. Companies such as Google (Google App Engine), Amazon (Amazon S3 and Web Services) and IBM (Blue Cloud) have been offering their services for some time.


Further references:
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/windowsazurefordevelopers/Default.aspx?path=AzureWhitePapers

Azure .Net service
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/netservices.aspx