Purposeful Clouds Partner

Microsoft Corporation

The Windows Azure platform is a simple, reliable, and powerful Microsoft platform for creating cloud applications, online services, and websites. Get the flexibility and interoperability you need to deliver robust, yet cost-effective, solutions to expand your practice and your revenue. The Windows Azure platform combines cloud-based developer capabilities with storage, computational, and networking infrastructure services. The platform consists of the following core products:

Purposeful Clouds view of how
Azure fits into our Cloud Cube

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Windows Azure™ is a 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 web applications on the internet through Microsoft® datacenters.

Windows Azure is a flexible platform that supports multiple languages and integrates with your existing on-premises environment. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio® expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards, protocols and languages including SOAP, REST, XML, Java, PHP and Ruby. Windows Azure is now commercially available in 40 countries.

Microsoft® SQL Azure™ Database is a cloud-based relational database service built on SQL Server® technologies. It provides a highly available, scalable, multi-tenant database service hosted by Microsoft in the cloud. SQL Azure Database helps to ease provisioning and deployment of multiple databases. Developers do not have to install, setup, patch or manage any software. High availability and fault tolerance is built-in and no physical administration is required. SQL Azure Database supports Transact-SQL (T-SQL). Customers can use existing knowledge in T-SQL development and a familiar relational data model for symmetry with existing on-premises databases. SQL Azure Database can help reduce costs by integrating with existing toolsets and providing symmetry with on-premises and cloud databases.

Windows Azure platform AppFabric helps developers connect applications and services in the cloud or on-premises. This includes applications running on Windows Azure, Windows Server and a number of other platforms including Java, Ruby, PHP and others. It provides a Service Bus for connectivity across network and organizational boundaries, and Access Control for federated authorization as a service.

Downloads

Azure Security Webinar presented to the BAUg, 24 February 2011, by Walt Lapinsky, CCSK, VP Cloud Security.

Apps in the Microsoft Cloud presented to the BAUg, 16 November 2010, by Chander Khanna, Founder & CEO.