The NSB Cloud - Mastering NServiceBus and Persistence - page 228

Using Microsoft Azure
The benefit of Azure is that it can be used in Microsoft data centers around the world. The
purpose of Azure is to have a Software Development Kit for websites, virtual machines,
and cloud services for either the cloud, on-premise, or a hybrid between the two. Some
cloud technologies, such as Salesforce, are cloud-centric and not on-premise-centric. The
Windows Azure SDK is considered open source from Microsoft, yes, open source, and it
can be found at https://github.com/Azure . There are Power Shell tools for Windows to de-
ploy (see https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-tools ) and even command-line tools for the
Linux and Mac operating systems (see http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/azure/
windows-azure-for-linux-and-mac-users.pdf and http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/docu-
mentation/articles/command-line-tools/ ).
Just as in Salesforce and other cloud technologies, there are galleries with pre-created ap-
plications and modules (see http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/gallery/store/ ), and there are
wizards to build the sites and samples (see http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/develop/net/
samples/ ) . Once you access Azure, you have the ability to create various applications and
services. There are many applications and services on the left that can be created. All
clouds use a pay-for-what-you-use model, mostly in production, for licensing. In Azure,
there is an Azure calculator to calculate the costs, http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/
calculator/ .
In Azure, there are three Execution models, meaning, there are normally three different
ways to deploy end-to-end applications:
• You can create a website, meaning, you can add backend storage, messaging, and
other pieces to it.
• You can create a virtual machine, meaning, you could add various pieces as you
would in a Linux or Windows Server to also deploy applications and a website.
• You can create cloud services, such as web service, which also contains backend
storage, messaging, and other pieces.
The websites can be created in PHP, ASP.NET, Node.js, or Python. The website can be cre-
ated so that the platform, patches, and all the platform pieces are handled for you. Since it
is ASP, it could be built locally and even deployed through the source control. You can
even create a domain, other than the cloud domain, for this website to be accessed on the
Internet.