Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud Server

Windows Azure, which was later renamed as Microsoft Azure in 2014, is a cloud computing platform, designed by Microsoft to successfully build, deploy, and manage applications and services through a global network of datacenters. This tutorial explains various features of this flexible platform and provides a step-by-step description of how to use the same.

 

This tutorial has been designed for software developers who are keen on developing best-in-class applications using this open and advanced platform of Windows Azure.

 

To learn Windows Azure, you need to be familiar with the Windows environment and have a basic knowledge of cloud computing.

 

Compute

  • Virtual machines, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) allowing users to launch general-purpose Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual machines, as well as preconfigured machine images for popular software packages.
  • App services, platform as a service (PaaS) environment letting developers easily publish and manage Web sites.
  • Websites, high density hosting of websites allows developers to build sites using ASP.NET, PHP, Node.js, or Python and can be deployed using FTP, Git, Mercurial, Team Foundation Server or uploaded through the user portal. This feature was announced in preview form in June 2012 at the Meet Microsoft Azure event. Customers can create websites in PHP, ASP.NET, Node.js, or Python, or select from several open source applications from a gallery to deploy. This comprises one aspect of the platform as a service (PaaS) offerings for the Microsoft Azure Platform. It was renamed to Web Apps in April 2015.
  • WebJobs, applications that can be deployed to a Web App to implement background processing. That can be invoked on a schedule, on demand or can run continuously. The Blob, Table and Queue services can be used to communicate between Web Apps and Web Jobs and to provide state