Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Other Azure services
Windows Azure Active Directory is designed to be used with cloud applications such as
SaaS applications. It also provides a
Single Sign On
(
SSO
) technology to work with Win-
dows Server Active Directory, Facebook, Google, and many other technologies.
Windows Azure Messaging allows applications to talk to other applications. The Azure
technologies provided for this are Windows Azure Service Bus and Windows Azure
Queues. The Azure Service Bus can have applications communicate with each other
through the cloud, on-premise or both. It communicates via queues, topics, or relays.
Queues are one-to-one messaging, topics are one-to-many publish/subscribe messaging,
and relays are bidirectional messaging. Relays do not store messages in between. Windows
Azure Queues provide the ability for queues to exist between the web and worker roles to
separate roles and responsibilities in passing messages between cloud queues. This allows
messages to be stored between the responsibilities of applications. However, queuing in the
cloud is not exactly the same as queuing on-premises because the worker role is respons-
ible for deleting the messages, so there may be no guarantee that the message is used once.
Windows Azure provides different network connection configurations, such as virtual net-
work, connect, and traffic management. The virtual network can use a static VPN through
IPSec for an always-on connection to the cloud to continuously connect on-premise to the
cloud. This is for users and developers who need continuous network access from on-
premise to the cloud. It will appear to be on the same network. There may be a need to con-
nect specific on-premise machines to specific cloud virtual machines. For this reason, we
use Windows Azure Connect. Specific cloud services connect to specific on-premise con-
nections. This is to specify developers and users to specific applications, for instance, con-
necting an on-premise DBA to a cloud SQL database. Windows Azure Traffic Manager
helps in routing specific users to specific clouds, for instance, connecting Asian customers
to the Asian cloud. This is based on policies defined in the Traffic manager.
Windows Azure provides mobile and media services as well. Media service has compon-
ents to help deploy media to users, which includes content protection, using different media
types and formats to assist in streaming media. Windows Azure mobile services allow the
backend development for mobile services. While mobile devices have native programming
done in Objective-C, Android, Java, PhoneGap, and Mono, mobile services allow a user to
log in and access data and applications to sync their devices through resources and web ser-
vices. They also allow SSO authentication and the ability to push to their devices when
they log in to receive updates.
