Cloud computing with the Azure platform

Software industry is heading towards centralized computing. Due to this trend data and programs are being taken away from traditional desktop PCs and placed in compute clouds instead. Compute clouds are enormous server farms packed with computing power and storage space accessible through the Internet. Instead of having to manage one’s own infrastructure to run applications, server time and storage space can can be bought from an external service provider. From the customers’ point of view the benefit behind this idea is to be able to dynamically adjust computing power up or down to meet the demand for that power at a particular moment. This kind of flexibility not only ensures that no costs are incurred by excess processing capacity, but also enables hardware infrastructure to scale up with business growth. Because of growing interest in taking advantage of cloud computing a number of service providers are working on providing cloud services. As stated in [7], Amazon, Salerforce.com and Google are examples of firms that already have working solutions on the market. Recently also Microsoft released a preview version of its cloud platform called the Azure. Early adopters can test the platform and development tools free of charge.[2, 3, 4] The main purpose of this paper is to shed light on the internals of Microsoft’s Azure platform. In addition to examining how Azure platform works, the benefits of Azure platform are explored. The most important benefit in Microsoft’s solution is that it resembles existing Windows environment a lot. Developers can use the same application programming interfaces (APIs) and development tools they are already used to. The second benefit is that migrating applications to cloud is easy. This partially stems from the fact that Azure’s services can be exploited by an application whether it is run locally or in the cloud.