Microsoft's take on cloud computing rests on a toolset called Azure. Like Amazon.com, Microsoft has created a software system that runs on Microsoft's own distributed data centers. Microsoft has made available its Windows Azure SDK, which currently is in Community Technology Preview form, for application development. In this first of several articles, eWEEK Labs tries out the Azure SDK.One of the foundations of Azure
(and many other cloud platforms) is the concept of geographically distributed
services. This allows users from different parts of the planet (and within
regions of the United States)
to be able to download or use services that are hosted on a service reasonably
close to them geographically. This has many obvious benefits, such as faster
response time and minimizing data transfers through an already overcrowded
Internet.
This is the first of several articles about Azure, Microsoft's cloud
computing platform that was rolled out in 2008. Azure is quite large, and
during the next year we're going to see several entire books written about
Azure. In other words, there's far too much to fit into a single article.
However, I do want give you an overview of it, and get you up and running. So
for this first article, I'll present a walk-through of the basic starter sample
that ships with the software development kit, while explaining the concepts.
If you want to follow along, you'll need either Vista
with Service Patch 1 or Windows Server 2008, as well as Visual Studio 2008. (Or
instead of Visual Studio 2008, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition works,
too, according to the online documentation). You'll also need either SQL Server
2005 Express or SQL Server 2008 Express. SQL Server 2008 Express
is available here.
Finally, you'll need both the Azure SDK and the Azure Tools for Visual Studio,
which you can download here
and here,
respectively.
Read the rest of this article on eWEEK.com.
