Few bits about Cloud Computing & Microsoft Azure Platform

Cloud Computing  &  few bits about Microsoft Azure Platform,

Cloud Computing

[From wikipedia, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing )]

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.

Leading companies offering Cloud Computing services, including:

• Amazon
• Google
• Microsoft

Amazon

• Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud)  - web hosting service http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
• Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service)  - providing storage in internet http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
• and many services like it... ...

Google

Google App Engine  - http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html

Allows to host application written in  Python  & Java

Microsoft

Azure services platform. Windows Azure - http://www.microsoft.com/azure/windowsazure.mspx

Allows to host application written in ASP.NET  & PHP

Java applications can also utilize “.NET services” by separate SDK

We can create, test and debug the applications using Visual Studio

 

Windows Azure Service Platform

Windows Azure is the cloud services operating system that provides various functionality for Cloud Computing. It serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides on-demand compute & storage services on the Internet in Microsoft data centers.

It provides various services including,

• .NET Services
• Azure Storage Services
• Live Services
• SQL Data Services.

Azure Storage Services

• Windows Azure Tables
• Windows Azure Blob
• Windows Azure Queue

Windows Azure "Tables"
- Used for "DBMS like" functionality. provides scalable, durable structured storage in the form of tables. The tables contain entities, and the entities contain properties.  support ACID transactions. It can be accessed as "REST programming approach" via "ADO.NET Data Services".

Windows Azure "Blob"
- Used for "storing Binary data" (ex, Photos, Videos any any type of files). 

Windows Azure "Queue"
- provides reliable storage and delivery of messages for an application.

 

 

Microsoft .NET Services

- set of developer-oriented services that provide key building blocks "for communication among applications".

[Much like the .NET Framework, for the Cloud computing].

• Access Control Service
• Service Bus

Access Control Service
- The Access Control Service is a cloud-based "Security Token Service (STS)". It provides way for standards-based identity checking.

Service Bus
- provides the familiar Enterprise Service Bus application pattern.

 

 

Live Services

- is a set of building blocks for handling "user data and application resources". Live Services includes Mesh technologies for synchronizing user data and extending Web applications across multiple devices.

 

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(more will be in later post)