Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
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Southeast Asia
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West Europe
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West US
In addition, you can create an
affinity group
that lets you keep certain Azure services together. Such a group
creates a geographic dependency between Windows and data services deployed in the Microsoft Azure platform. If
Microsoft is required to move a service to another geolocation for regulatory reasons, the related services are likely to
move along. For example, if you develop an Azure service that depends on a SQL Database instance, you may want to
ensure that they both reside in the same geolocation and that they belong to the same affinity group.
Additional locations will be added over time. As a result, you may need to reevaluate on a regular basis whether
a service is deployed in the most appropriate geographic location. Keep in mind that moving services to other
geographic locations can be time consuming.
Storing Data in Azure
As you can imagine, cloud computing is all about storing data in a simple yet scalable manner. The Microsoft Azure
platform offers a variety of storage models that you can choose from. This section summarizes the four ways you can
store your data in Azure; three of these approaches are considered part of the Azure services.
Figure
1-2
provides an overview of the storage options and the available access methods. The set of storage
options provided by Windows Azure is referred to as
Windows Azure storage
, which includes blobs, tables, and
queues. Windows Azure storage can be accessed directly from a corporate environment using HTTP/S calls, providing
a simple hook into the Microsoft Azure platform. In addition to using Windows Azure storage, consumers can make
requests directly to a SQL Database instance using ADO.NET or ODBC, because SQL Database supports the Tabular
Data Stream (TDS) protocol that SQL Server uses. As a result, applications and services connecting to a SQL Server
database can just as easily connect to SQL Database.
Figure 1-2.
Microsoft Azure data storage access
