Microsoft offers extensive support and many great resources for developers that help you to develop applications. Windows Azure™ is currently available in 40 countries with more coming soon
- Features:
- Web Sites,
Web Sites
Create and deploy web sites in seconds, as powerful as you need them to be
Get started for free and scale as you go on a cloud platform across shared and reserved instances for greater isolation and performance. Use any tool or OS to build a web site with ASP.NET, PHP or Node.js and deploy in seconds.
Use Web Sites to:
Run everything, just like that
It’s easy to deploy web sites to the cloud as-is. If your site is built with ASP.NET, PHP or Node.js, it will run on Windows Azure Web Sites.
Start with open source
Launch a site with a few clicks using popular open source apps like WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, DotNetNuke and Umbraco.
Take advantage of integrated source control
With Windows Azure Web Sites you can deploy directly from your source code repository. Simply ‘git push’ from the Git repository of your choice or connect your Team Foundation Service projects and enjoy continuous source integration. Automated deployment has never been so easy.
- SQL Database,
- Caching
Caching
Bring data closer to your users for a great, responsive experience anywhere in the world
Caching services in Windows Azure enable you to build highly scalable and responsive applications by bringing data closer to end-users. Easily configure Content Delivery Network (CDN) capabilities to create a fast, smooth user experience. Windows Azure also provides In-Memory Cache that can store your application’s data in memory to improve application responsiveness, performance and scale. Both are backed by a 99.9% monthly SLA.
Content Delivery Network
Windows Azure CDN improves performance of your applications by caching content at locations closest to your customers so you can provide the best experience for your application. Rely on the same network infrastructure that supports Microsoft’s highly available services such as Windows Update and Bing Maps.
Use CDN to:
Easily add edge caching to your application
CDN is completely integrated with Blob storage, so it just takes one click in the Windows Azure management portal to enable CDN delivery for your applications.
Expand your reach around the globe
Located in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America, CDN offers developers a global solution for delivering high-bandwidth content.
Caching
Windows Azure Caching delivers data closer to application logic. As user load increases, the Cache helps applications be more responsive, allowing your applications to scale. Choose between two deployment options – a managed, multi-tenant shared cache (Shared Caching) or a cache that uses your existing or dedicated web/worker roles (Caching – currently in Preview).
Use Caching to:
Easily add caching capabilities
Use Caching providers without coding or program to the Caching API. Memcached protocol support enables existing Memcached applications to use Windows Azure Caching.
Provide resiliency
Data you store in the cache is accessible from multiple instances of your application enabling state to be easily and quickly saved and recovered. Windows Azure Caching (Preview) adds additional control and resilience options like high availability to ensure that your cached data is resilient.
Virtual Machines
Infrastructure on your terms
With Windows Azure you can easily bring your own customized Windows Server or Linux images or select from a gallery. Retain full control of your images and maintain them as your business requires. Windows Azure also helps to migrate your applications and infrastructure without changing existing code, making it faster to move SharePoint, SQL Server or Active Directory to the cloud – saving you time and money.
Use Virtual Machines to:
Gain flexibility
Virtual Machines give you application mobility, allowing you to move your virtual hard disks (VHDs) back and forth between on-premises and the cloud.
Run core apps in the cloud
If your business relies on popular Microsoft server applications, Virtual Machines help you run the same on-premises enterprise applications and infrastructure in the cloud. Work seamlessly with applications like Microsoft SQL Server, Active Directory and Microsoft SharePoint Server.
Get connected
With full admin access, you can remotely connect into your virtual machines and take control.
- Features:
- Windows Virtual Machines,
- Linux Virtual Machines,
- Storage,
- Virtual Network
Networking
The most complete set of networking capabilities to connect your on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud
Virtual Network
Windows Azure Virtual Network lets you provision and manage virtual private networks (VPNs) in Windows Azure as well as securely link these with on-premises IT infrastructure. With Virtual Network, IT administrators can extend on-premises networks into the cloud with control over network topology, including configuration of DNS and IP address ranges for Virtual Machines.
Use Virtual Network to:
Securely extend your data center
With Virtual Network, you can build traditional ‘site-to-site’ VPNs to securely scale your datacenter capacity. Virtual Network uses industry-standard IPSEC protocol to provide a secure connection between your corporate VPN gateway and Windows Azure. Add as many machines as you want behind the VPN gateway.
Enable hybrid cloud scenarios
Virtual Network gives you the flexibility to support a range of hybrid cloud scenarios. You can securely connect cloud-based applications to any type of on-premises system such as mainframes and Unix systems.
Windows Azure Connect
Windows Azure Connect provides an agent-based, machine-to-machine connection between Windows Azure services and on-premises resources such as database servers and domain controllers. Windows Azure gives you complete control to create virtual networks and configure IP addresses in the cloud.
Use Windows Azure Connect to:
Build distributed applications
Windows Azure Connect makes it easier to build cloud applications hosted in a hybrid environment, maintaining secure connections with on-premises infrastructure without the creation of custom codes. For example, a web application hosted in Windows Azure can securely access an on-premise SQL Server database server or authenticate users against an on-premise Active Directory service.
Remotely debug your applications
With Windows Azure Connect, you can create a direct connection between your local development machine and applications hosted in Windows Azure, which allows you to troubleshoot and debug them using the same tools you would use for on-premises applications.
Traffic Manager
Traffic Manager allows you to load balance incoming traffic across multiple hosted Windows Azure services whether they’re running in the same datacenter or across different datacenters around the world. By effectively managing traffic, you can ensure high performance, availability and resiliency of your applications. Traffic Manager provides you a choice of three load balancing methods: performance, failover, or round robin.
Use Traffic Manager to:
Ensure high availability for your applications
Traffic Manager enables you to improve the availability of your critical applications by monitoring your hosted services in Windows Azure and providing automatic failover capabilities when a service goes down.
Run responsive applications
Windows Azure allows you to run services in datacenters located around the globe. By serving end-users with the hosted service that is closest to them in terms of network latency, Traffic Manager can improve the responsiveness of your applications and content delivery times.
Identity
Integrate your on-premises active directory for single sign-on across your cloud applications
Windows Azure Active Directory
Windows Azure Active Directory (Windows Azure AD) is a modern, REST-based service that provides identity management and access control capabilities for your cloud applications. Now you have one identity service across Windows Azure, Microsoft Office 365, Dynamics CRM Online, Windows Intune and other 3rd party cloud services. Windows Azure Active Directory provides a cloud-based identity provider that easily integrates with your on-premises AD deployments and full support of third party identity providers.
Use Windows Azure AD to:
Integrate with your on-premises active directory
Quickly extend your existing on-premises Windows Azure AD to apply policy and control and authenticate users with their existing corporate credentials to Windows Azure and other cloud services.
Offer access control for you applications
Easily manage access to your applications based on centralized policy and rules. Ensure consistent and appropriate access to your organizations applications is maintained to meet critical internal security and compliance needs. Windows Azure AD Access Control provides developers centralized authentication and authorization for applications in Windows Azure using either consumer identity providers or your on-premises Windows Server Active Directory
Build social connections across the enterprise
Windows Azure AD Graph is an innovative social enterprise graph providing an easy RESTful interface for accessing objects such as Users, Groups, and Roles with an explorer view for easily discovering information and relationships.
Provide single sign-on across your cloud applications
Provide your users with a seamless, single sign-on experience across Microsoft Online Services, third party cloud services and applications built on Windows Azure with popular web identity providers like Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook.
Cloud Services
Create highly-available, infinitely scalable applications and API’s
Quickly deploy and manage powerful applications and services with Windows Azure Cloud Services. Simply upload your application and Windows Azure handles the deployment details – from provisioning and load balancing to health monitoring for continuous availability. Your application is backed by an industry leading 99.95% monthly SLA. You just focus on the application and not the infrastructure. It’s that good.
Use Cloud Services to:
Focus on your application, not the infrastructure
Never worry about patching, hardware failures, or network issues again. Windows Azure Cloud Services is designed to let you build applications that are continuously available even during system upgrades and hardware failures. Now you can just work on the code – the part that matters.
Develop internet-scale API’s for a world of devices
Every new mobile application needs a powerful set of server side services to power it. With Windows Azure Cloud Services you have everything you need to build the most robust, scalable APIs you can dream up. Take advantage of instant access to infinite scale so you can handle huge success without having to write any new code.
Build modern, cloud architectures
Windows Azure Cloud Services provides the most effective application environment for building the most modern, distributed, computing applications on the planet. Your customers will benefit from apps that respond faster and never go down.
- Features:
- Cloud Services,
- SQL Database,
- Caching,
- Business Analytics,
- Service Bus,
Messaging
Keep your apps connected across private and public cloud environments
Windows Azure Service Bus and Windows Azure EAI enable cloud to on-premises integration scenarios such as accessing your on-premises line of business applications like SAP and Oracle EBS from Windows Azure.
Windows Azure Service Bus
Service Bus is messaging infrastructure that sits between applications allowing them to exchange messages in a loosely coupled way for improved scale and resiliency. Service Bus is managed and operated by Microsoft with a 99.9% monthly SLA.
Use Service Bus to:
Manage message delivery in the cloud
Service Bus Queues offer simple first in, first out guaranteed message delivery and supports a range of standard protocols (REST, AMQP, WS*) and API’s to put/pull messages on/off a queue. Service Bus Topics deliver messages to multiple subscriptions and easily fan out message delivery at scale to downstream systems.
Connect on-premises applications to the cloud
Service Bus Relay solves the challenges of communicating between on-premises applications and the outside world by allowing on-premises web services to project public endpoints. Systems can then access these web services, which continue to run on-premises from anywhere on the planet.
Queues
Windows Azure Queue service is used for reliable, persistent messaging between applications. You can use Queues to transfer messages between applications or services in Windows Azure. Queues store messages that may be read by any client who has access to the storage account. A queue can contain an unlimited number of messages, each of which can be up to 64KB in size. Queues are assessable via REST services from anywhere via the internet, and supports .NET, Java and Node.JS client libraries.
Data Management
The right solution for your data needs, from sql database to blobs to tables
Windows Azure offers multiple services to help manage your data in the cloud. SQL Database, formerly known as SQL Azure Database, enables organizations to rapidly create, scale and extend applications into the cloud with familiar tools and the power of Microsoft SQL Server™ technology. Tables offer NoSQL capabilities at a low cost for applications with simple data access needs. Blobs provide inexpensive storage for data such as video, audio, and images. All are backed with a 99.9% monthly SLA. Windows Azure also offers the ability to run SQL Server in a virtual machine on Windows Azure.
SQL Database
For applications that need a full featured relational database-as-a-service, Windows Azure offers SQL Database, formerly known as SQL Azure Database. SQL Database offers a high-level of interoperability, enabling customers to build applications using many of the major development frameworks. Additionally, SQL Database, based on the proven technologies of SQL Server, provides the ability to use existing skills and knowledge to accelerate time to solution as well as build or extend applications across on-premises and cloud. Learn more about business analytics cloud services based on SQL Server.
Use SQL Database to:
Build enterprise apps
SQL Database is an ideal database for a wide variety of business applications including transaction processing, departmental or line of business solutions. Deliver sophisticated cloud-based services with proven reliability and performance. Get massive scale out for your relational databases through sharding with SQL Federation, provide secure and reliable access to data with familiar control mechanisms, and easily deploy your databases with no physical administration required.
Power hybrid applications
SQL Database can be accessed from applications hosted in Windows Azure as well as from applications hosted on-premises. Data can easily be shared across SQL Database and SQL Server databases, as well as across multiple SQL Databases with SQL Data Sync.
Tables
Tables offer NoSQL capabilities for applications that require storage of large amounts of unstructured data. Tables are an ISO 27001 certified managed service which can auto scale to meet massive volume of up to 100 terabytes and throughput and accessible from virtually anywhere via REST and managed API’s.
Blob (Binary Large Object) storage
Blobs are the simplest way to store large amounts of unstructured text or binary data such as video, audio and images. Blobs are an ISO 27001 certified managed service can auto-scale to meet massive volume of up to 100 terabytes and throughput and accessible from virtually anywhere via REST and managed API’s.
Use Blobs to:
Easily mount blobs as drives
Windows Azure Drive allows applications to mount a BLOB formatted as a single volume NTFS VM. You can move your VMs between private and public clouds using Windows Azure Drive.
- Features:
- Hadoop,
- Business Analytics,
Business Analytics
Easily build applications with a modern business analytics platform
Microsoft’s business analytics solutions for Windows Azure embrace the new scope, scale, and diversity of data today. These solutions provide enterprise class data management and emerging technologies such as Hadoop for Big Data. They enable ease of discovery and data enrichment with 3rd party data sets and information services from the Windows Azure Marketplace. Additionally they deliver insight to users by surfacing and building reporting capabilities into your Windows Azure applications with Windows Azure SQL Reporting.
Business Analytics in Windows Azure Virtual Machines
Use Windows Azure Virtual Machine to run SQL Server business analytics related technologies like Reporting and Analysis Services as well as SharePoint Server in a Virtual Machine.
SQL Reporting
Windows Azure SQL Reporting allows you to build easily accessible reporting capabilities into your Windows Azure application. SQL Reporting lets you create reports with tables, charts, maps, gauges, and more as well as to deploy them on both private and public clouds. With the cloud at your service, there’s no need to manage or maintain your own reporting infrastructure. You can get up and running in days versus months. Learn more about SQL Database on Windows Azure.
Data Marketplace
The Windows Azure Marketplace is a global online market for SaaS applications and premium datasets. By listing your Windows Azure-based applications on the marketplace, you can commerce-enable and sell your applications internationally. Plus, you can subscribe to a range of premium datasets listed in the marketplace within your applications or monetize and distribute your own datasets through the marketplace.
Windows Azure Marketplace
The global place to buy and sell saas applications and premium datasets – whatever you need to is ready to go
The Windows Azure Marketplace is a global online market for SaaS applications and premium datasets. By listing your Windows Azure-based applications on the marketplace, you can commerce-enable and sell your applications internationally. Plus, you can subscribe to a range of premium datasets listed in the marketplace within your applications or monetize and distribute your own datasets through the marketplace.
Use Marketplace to:
Gain global reach
Commerce-enable your applications, and conduct transactions in multiple geographies and currencies. Easily search curated marketplace of applications and data by categories and filters. Datasets and services surfaced in key Microsoft products: Microsoft Office, SQL Server 2012, and Dynamics CRM.
Cover all your bases
Develop a common security, billing, auditing, and authentication model, including Single Sign-on experience using OAuth v2. Easily publish and consume datasets and services using OData; a single, consistent REST-based API.
Easily manage your offerings
Take advantage of easy self-service onboarding, creation of terms of use and trial offers and reporting on traffic, subscriptions, and sales.
Hadoop for Big Data
Windows Azure previews a Hadoop service that delivers insights to everyone through familiar tools like Microsoft Office and Sharepoint, connects you to data and services outside your organization and offers the simplicity of Windows to Big Data. Query against SQL Databases and unstructured data sources.
Create, manage and distribute media in the cloud. This PaaS offering provides everything from encoding to content protection to streaming and analytics support.Learn More
- Features:
- Media Services,
-
Media Services
Build workflows for the creation, management, and distribution of media with windows azure Media Services
Media Services offer the flexibility, scalability and reliability of a cloud platform to handle high quality media experiences for a global audience. Media Services includes cloud-based versions of many existing technologies from the Microsoft Media Platform and our media partners, including ingest, encoding, format conversion, content protection and both on-demand and live streaming capabilities. Whether enhancing existing solutions or creating new workflows, you can easily combine and manage Media Services to create custom workflows that fit every need.
Use Media Services to:
Build end to end workflows
Build comprehensive media workflows entirely in the cloud. From uploading media to distributing content, Media Services provide a range of pre-build, ready-to-use, first and third-party components that can be combined to meet your specific needs. Capabilities include upload, storage, encoding, format conversion, content protection, and delivery.
Develop hybrid workflows
Easily integrate Media Services with tools and processes you already use. For example, encode content on-site then upload to Media Services for transcoding into multiple formats and deliver through a third-party CDN. Media Services can be called individually via standard REST API’s for easy integration with external applications and services.
Provide cloud support for multiple devices and platforms
Creating, managing and delivering media across multiple devices has never been easier. Media Services provide everything you need to deliver content to a variety of devices, from Xbox and Windows PCs, to MacOS, iOS and Android.
To try this feature in preview, you will need a Windows Azure account. To begin your sign up, click here.
- CDN,
- Storage
Escape Business Solutions 