Microsoft Windows Azure Introduction
Cloud Computing offers three types of services, those are Software, Platform, and Infrastructure services called as SPI. SaaS is Software as a Service, PaaS is Platform as a Service, and IaaS is Infrastructure as a Service. Gmail & Yahoo are best examples for SaaS mode, Microsoft Azure is an example for PaaS, and Amazon S3 is an example of the IaaS model.
Windows Azure cloud computing platform is provided by Microsoft. It is described as managed data centers used to build, deploy, and manage the applications through a global network. Microsoft Windows Azure provides PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). It supports many programming languages and frameworks.
Windows Azure as IaaS: Microsoft Azure provides complete infrastructure control, that means control on the operating systems and application platform stack to the developers. Through IaaS, it allows users to completed access, manage, and monitor the data centers. It is very much helpful for applications which require complete control. Windows Azure offers Virtual machines to organizations for complete control and users will have complete control on that virtual machine and operating system.
Windows Azure as PaaS: Microsoft provides platform as a service to users to develop and deploy applications on the cloud. Clients just need to focus on the application development and no need to worry about hardware and infrastructure. Windows Azure also takes care of servers, operating systems, and networking issues. By using Windows Azure as a PaaS, the overall cost of the project can be reduced because resources allocated on demand. Servers are automatically getting updated, less vulnerable to viruses. Microsoft Azure always provides new versions of development tools, it is very easy for developers to move to new tools which help to meet customer demands.
Microsoft Windows Azure as a PaaS (Platform as a Service)
has many advantages as compared with Azure
as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). Because with PaaS, developers no need to
worry about infrastructure and cost also very less. Whereas Azure with IaaS
gives complete control of the server & OS and cost also high compared with
PaaS.
