Windows Azure
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| Developer(s) | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Initial release | February 1, 2010 |
| Operating system | Linux, Microsoft Windows |
| License | Closed source for platform, Open source for client SDKs |
| Website | azure |
Microsoft Azure /ˈæʒər/ is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.
Azure was announced in October 2008 and released on February 1, 2010 as Windows Azure, before being renamed to Microsoft Azure on 25 March 2014.
Microsoft lists over 600 Azure services, of which some are covered below:
The Microsoft Azure Service Bus allows applications running on Azure premises or off premises devices to communicate with Azure. This helps to build scalable and reliable applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The Azure service bus supports four different types of communication mechanisms:
A PaaS offering that can be used for encoding, content protection, streaming, or analytics.
A global content delivery network (CDN) for audio, video, applications, images, and other static files. Can be used to cache static assets of websites geographically closer to users to increase performance. The network can be managed by a REST based HTTP API.
Azure has 30 point of presence locations worldwide (also known as Edge locations) as of December, 2016.
Azure is generally available in 32 regions around the world, and has announced plans for 6 additional regions.
Microsoft Azure uses a specialized operating system, called Microsoft Azure, to run its "fabric layer": a cluster hosted at Microsoft's data centers that manages computing and storage resources of the computers and provisions the resources (or a subset of them) to applications running on top of Microsoft Azure. Microsoft Azure has been described as a "cloud layer" on top of a number of Windows Server systems, which use Windows Server 2008 and a customized version of Hyper-V, known as the Microsoft Azure Hypervisor to provide virtualization of services.
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