Microsoft announced the business and partner model for the company’s Windows Azure Platform during the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference 2009. The Windows Azure platform delivers a rich development experience, automated service management and pay-as-you-go pricing — all backed by service-level agreements and support.
What is the Windows Azure Platform?
The Windows Azure 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 platform includes a cloud services operating system, a Web-based relational database in Microsoft SQL Azure, and connectivity and interoperability with .NET Services.
The Azure Services
Windows Azure
WindowsAzure 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 manages internet or cloud applications. Windows Azure supports a reliable development experience through its integration with Visual Studio.
Live Services
Live Services provides developers with an easy on-ramp to build rich social applications and experiences, across a range of digital devices that can connect with one of the largest audiences on the Web.
Microsoft SQL Azure
Microsoft SQL Server capabilities are extended into the cloud as a Web-based distributed relational database via the Microsoft SQL Azure service.
Microsoft .NET Services
Microsoft .NET Services make developing loosely coupled cloud-based applications easier by providing access control to help secure your applications, a service bus for communicating across applications and services, and hosted workflow execution.
Microsoft SharePoint Services & Dynamics CRM Services
In the future, developers will have access to SharePoint & CRM functionality for collaboration and building stronger customer relationships. With the Visual Studio IDE, developers will be able to rapidly build applications that utilize SharePoint and CRM capabilities as developer service.
Pricing
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Consumption Based: The consumption-based model offers partners and customers with a clear and simple pricing structure that uses a few meters to track overall usage and allows for predictable payments. Partners and customers can leverage this type of pay-as-you-go pricing to optimize cloud elasticity and reduce hurdles to entry.
- Discount For Partners: Microsoft partners receive an additional 5 percent promotional discount on Windows Azure compute, SQL Azure and .NET Services.
- Free To Try: Customers to start building on the community technology preview (CTP) for free subjected to certain limits like:
- Total compute usage: 2000 VM hours
- Cloud storage capacity: 50GB
- Total storage bandwidth: 20GB/day
The services come with Service Level Agreements, separate for compute and storage.
Using Windows Azure Operating System and Microsoft Silverlight, the West Monroe Partners developed and hosted the interactive map for the city of Chicago within two weeks to meet the needs for the Taste of Chicago festival.
The benefits of using Windows Azure Platform were:
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Fast, Cost-Effective Development
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Immediate Customer Satisfaction
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Increased Agility
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Dynamic User Experience
Windows Azure Basic
How Can You Get Started?
Currently use the Community Technology Preview (CTP) Program and try for free.
