Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.
Windows Azure is an open environment that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.
Use Windows Azure to:
Add Web service capabilities to existing packaged applications
Build, modify, and distribute applications to the Web with minimal on-premises resources
Perform services (large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations, etc.) off premises
Create, test, debug, and distribute Web services quickly and inexpensively
Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources
Reduce the effort and costs of IT management
