What is Azure

•Azure Windows is Microsoft's public cloud solution, a Microsoft data center running on cloud computing platform.
•Azure Windows is also the core component of the Microsoft OS Cloud solution and the "Devices + Services" strategy.
•In China, Windows Azure combines Microsoft's global technology and internet -century local operating experience, Qiangqiang, creating for China an international enterprise cloud computing platform.

The bottom of the operating system is Azure Windows, which provides the three main functions of computing, storage, and managment. In addition, there is also a transparent fabric for the users. Fabric consists of load balancing, hardware abstraction, and many other functions. In general, however, users do not need to understand how the internal Fabric work before making full use of the various characteristics of Azure Windows.
In this regard, it also provides a middleware product AppFabric, database products, Azure SQL, as well as some other block building products, for example currently the CTP phase in Dallas. Developers can work directly on Azure Windows, and also use various characteristics of SQL, Azure AppFabric and other products.

Azure Functional Modules Introduction

Advantages / value of Azure

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  Speed

  The development speed of the application running in the cloud can be significantly faster than the traditional application development, which has two reasons. First, you don't need to deploy, configure, and maintain the underlying computing, storage, and network infrastructure for running applications. Instead, you can use your cloud hosting provider to provide you with the infrastructure resources.
  
  Cloud based applications can be deployed faster for second reasons related to the development of the application. In a typical enterprise environment, developers create and test their applications in a test environment, which can only partially simulate the final production environment.

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  Scale

  Scale cloud applications are also able to quickly expand, because the commercial computing, storage and network resources by the custodian pool, and can be in demand, to provide tenants. Do your applications need more computing resources to meet the growing needs of customers? Running applications in the cloud can help you meet customer requirements. Does the market downturn mean that you don't need to have the full capacity of the hosting provider to provide your application? Only need to reduce the computing capacity of the hosting provider you are using.
  
  In addition to the rapid upward or downward expansion capabilities, cloud computing can also provide a global scale for your application, will expand your business to the world. In today's global economic environment, this scalability is essential for enterprises to maintain competitive advantage.

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  Economic performance

  For economic benefits, many organizations have decided to use the cloud because the cost of running their business applications in the cloud is much lower than in local operations. For cloud computing, you can use the flow billing model, you only need to pay for the actual use of the enterprise resource. The ability to quickly and easily extend up or down to the cloud can be a reality that can help organizations save money. Actually, some of the windows azure services, such as windows azure virtual machine now supports the per minute billing, to help customers to the greatest extent reduce the cost of server workloads running on Windows azure.
  
  About hardware acquisition costs, cloud computing can also bring economic benefits for the enterprise. In general, large enterprises usually from the third party storage area network (SAN) for the business to buy and deploy SAN, to meet the needs of its data storage upgrade. Through cloud hosting providers to provide storage resources, these companies usually can significantly reduce their storage and maintenance costs of the purchase.