Windows Azure Services Platform

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 currently in Community Technology Preview. Commercial availability for Windows Azure will likely be at the end of calendar year 2009.

Windows Azure is an open platform 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.

We can use azure service for
* 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

On August 11,2009 we are releasing a new set of features for Windows Azure Blob. Windows Azure Blob enables applications to store and manipulate large objects and files in the cloud. The blobs (files) can be up to 50GB in size for the CTP.

All changes for this release are versioned changes, using “x-ms-version: 2009-07-17”. All prior versions of commands executed against the storage system will continue to work, as we extend the capabilities of the existing commands and introduce new commands.
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/netservices.mspx