Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Microsoft has traditionally been a software provider, but the company has slowly moved closer to
hardware solutions over the years. In the late 1990s, Microsoft engaged with Unisys, HP, Dell, and other
hardware manufacturers to provide highly available Windows-based platforms (Windows Data Center
Edition). At the same time, Microsoft invested significant resources to build its Microsoft Systems
Architecture (MSA). This program was designed to help corporations plan, deploy, and manage
Microsoft-based IT architecture. These initiatives, along with many others, helped Microsoft develop
strong knowledge capital around highly available and scalable architectures, which are a prerequisite for
building cloud computing platforms.
Amazon entered the cloud computing space with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services in 2005.
A few years later, Google and IBM joined forces to enter this market, and Microsoft announced many of
its cloud computing plans during 2009, including the Azure platform. As part of its Azure platform,
Microsoft delivered a very unique component in its cloud computing offering: a transactional database
called SQL Azure.
Typical Cloud Services
Generally speaking, cloud computing comes in one of three flavors:
•
SaaS: software as a service.
This delivery platform is usually in the form of web
applications that are made available on the Internet for a fee. This model has been
around for a few years.
•
PaaS: platform as a service.
This service offers a computing platform that
facilitates the use and deployment of other services and scales according to the
general expectations of cloud computing, such as scalability and pay-as-you-go.
IaaS: infrastructure as a service.
This offering provides the necessary
infrastructure that offers the scalability typically associated with cloud computing.
SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS are considered the fundamental building blocks of cloud computing. Other
acronyms are being manufactured to depict new flavors of cloud computing, such as desktop as a
service (DaaS), hardware as a service (HaaS), and even research as a service (RaaS). Pretty soon, the
entire alphabet will be consumed in describing the many flavors of services that can be created in the
cloud.
•
Discovering the Microsoft Azure Platform
Let's discover the three major components of the Microsoft Azure platform, also called the Azure
services: Windows Azure, Windows Azure AppFabric, and SQL Azure. All three offer unique capabilities
that provide a complete array of services needed to build highly scalable and secure solutions:
•
Windows Azure.
A collection of virtual Microsoft operating systems that can run
your web applications and services in the cloud. For example, you can create a
web service that converts US dollars to Euros; then, you can deploy the service on
Windows Azure and allow it to scale as needed. Note that Windows Azure can run
.NET applications and other platforms as well, including PHP.
•
Windows Azure AppFabric.
A set of services that provide core capabilities such as
federated identity for access control, and a service bus for a messaging-based
subscriber/publisher topology.
