Windows Azure is the cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Internet or cloud applications. and services on the Internet in Microsoft data centers.

Windows Azure supports a consistent development experience through its integration with Visual Studio. In the early stages of CTP, .NET managed applications built using Visual Studio will be supported. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. Windows Azure welcomes third-party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python.


Windows® Azure is the operating system that serves as the development, run-time, and control environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure handles load balancing and resource management and automatically manages the life cycle of a service based on requirements that the owner of the service established. A developer who wishes to deploy an application to Windows Azure specifies the service topology, including the number of instances to deploy and any configuration settings. Windows Azure deploys the service and manages upgrades and failures to maintain availability.

Basic Working Model


Storage Services

The Windows Azure storage services provide persistent, durable storage in the cloud. To access the storage services, you must have a storage account, which is provided through the developer portal.

The fundamental storage services include:

* Blob service, for storing text or binary data

* Queue service, for reliable, persistent messaging between services

* Table service, for structured storage that can be queried

The Windows Azure SDK offers REST APIs for working with the storage services. You may access the storage services from within a service running in Windows Azure or directly over the Internet from any application that can send and receive data over HTTP/HTTPS.

Compute Service

Windows Azure offers an Internet-scale hosting environment built on geographically distributed data centers. This hosting environment provides a runtime execution environment for managed code.

A Windows Azure compute service is built from one or more roles. A role defines a component that may run in the execution environment; within Windows Azure, a service may run one or more instances of a role.

Currently Windows Azure supports the following two types of roles:

* A web role is an ASP.NET Web application that may be accessed via an HTTP or HTTPS endpoint. Web roles run in integrated pipeline mode on an Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 Hosted Web Core.

* A worker role is a background processing component. It does not accept inbound network connections.

A service may be comprised of one or both types of roles, and may include multiple roles of each type.




Developers can use the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio® to build, package, and run services from within Visual Studio. The Windows Azure Tools also provide project templates for designing roles. The tools are available as a separate download and are not included as part of this SDK.
Developer Model