http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/tutorials/web-site-with-sql-database/
Windows Azure as an Operating System - It abstracts a set of servers, providing a common platform for building services and applications in a completely virtual environment.
You work with servers, you deploy an application and no need to configure the infrastructure
Storage - It uses shared storage.
You can not install the Windows Azure locally but you can use the local development environment that simulates the cloud version of Windows Azure so that you can test your solution before deploying them. Windows Azure does not come in a software box nor can you see a demo version to download or try. Everything is in the cloud.
Model - It is a set of rules that the windows azure follows to deploy your application. It is a logical description of an application's configuration in the cloud.
Service - code that can be exposed and used.eg:ASP.NET application, a while block which dequeues messages, WCF service.A service can be hosted in the platform on different servers. A service that runs on on-premises can run in the cloud as well.
Server - also referred as node is based on Windows Server 2008 R2. Each server is a part of server collection that resides in a container.
Container - It is placed in a data center by plugging a giant cable that has network connectivity and electric power.
Deployment requires a name, package location and configuration file (.cscfg) location (Service name and Instances count are only needed)
To Create a new solution
1. Create a hosted service providing the name of the Service, the public URL, and the
region.
2. Upload the cloud service package (the binaries) and the configuration file.
Easy to launch an app, Easy to scale up and down too
Suppose a company decides to launch a new app,the company might buy new hardware, but installing, configuring,securing, deploying, and testing the application on the hardware (in addition to other activities) would take time. Instead, the company decided to host the service on Windows
Azure, so when the application became popular (it was the top-selling app in its category) in
October and November, the company
just incremented the number of instances. That took
only a few seconds, and we did nothing but change a number in the model. You can click the
Configure button of the deployed solution to increase the server capacity at any time.
Like wise to scale down the solution too its just a matter of seconds.
APIs to manage the resources.
Every service hosted in Windows Azure can manage the resources exposed by the operating
system using the appropriate APIs.For example, in the service model, you can request 40 GB of disk space for local storage, and then use the RoleEnvironment class to request a file path that you can use to manage that space.Windows Azure can allocate the 40 GBs on a local disk, so you cannot refer to directories and files using the classic path; instead, you have to ask Windows Azure for that location and then use the classic System.IO API, basing the root path on it.You can use this space to cache resources or store temporary files. Don't use it to store store application data, session state, or any other data that you cannot recalculate quickly from the application code.
Environments for a hosted service
Windows Azure exposes two different environments for each hosted service
1.
Staging - temporary URL has a GUID followed by your service name eg:http://<guid>.cloudapp.net
2.
Production - eg:http://azuresbs123.cloudapp.net
You have to
pay to host for both.
You can swap production and staging environments whenever you want—it takes just a moment. Typically, you deploy a new version to the staging environment, test it, and then press the
VIP Swap button to move the staging version to the production environment and the old production code to the staging environment. If something goes wrong, you can immediately swap the two environments again to return to the previous situation and investigate the problem. The swap operation occurs in near real-time because Windows Azure fabric just adjusts the internal DNS, exchanging the pointers.
Windows Azure Storage:
The operating system lets you store three different kinds of resources:
1.
Blob storage to store files.eg: traditional file system and using blob containers - folders
2.
Tables are a type of unstructured entity container. Not RDBMS, just store data in rows and columns
in a table you can store 1MB in one row.
3.
Queues to decouple two applications.Communication between roles, between web roles and between worker roles and between a web role and a worker role.
To use these types of storage, you have to create a storage account project from the portal.
Windows Azure exposes the storage account data using Internet standards such as HTTP,
REST, and OData (Open Data Protocol), so it’s accessible by just about any platform in our
galaxy.
