Part 1- Introduction to windows Azure and how you can create account

Article
07/25/2012

What is Windows Azure?

Windows Azure is Comprehensive platform for running applications; simply you can consider it as a place where you can host and execute your code in the cloud.

The main benefit of azure are:-

- Scalability
- Availability
- Fault Tolerance

Azure has three core components:-

1. Compute: - is the virtual machines that will run your code.

2. Storage: - is a scalable storage in the cloud which is auto-scale to meet massive volume and throughput database based on customer needs. Any data you upload in the cloud storage automatically replicated to 3 locations in Azure to provide you with high availability.

Windows Azure storage has four types:-

· Table: - group of entities (name/value pairs)

· Queue: - Simple non-transactional message queue

· Blob: - Large binary storage

· Drives: - NTFS VHD mounted into Compute instance

3. SQL Azure Database:- Is SQL Server relational database model delivered as a service which support

· Support for existing APIs & tools

· Built for the cloud with high availability & fault tolerance

· Easily provision and manage databases across multiple datacenters

Service, Roles, and Instances

Service, Roles, and Instances are representing the structure in windows Azure. Let say that you want to host website on windows azure, the first step you have to do is creating a service. The service is a container for your application and you assign the public URL for this service, so you can consider for every application you need to create a service.

Each service can contains one or more role. Let say that you want to host website which is 2 tier applications, so you will create a service for your website contains 2 roles one is web role and the second one is database server.

Finally, you have to define how many instance you need from each role. Back to our example if you want to host website you will create 1 service contains 2 Role (web, SQL) and 2 instances from web role (2 web server) and 2 instances from Database role.