How do you pronounce Azure? Ashure … Azyouwere ?? Funny video

• Private cloud computing for large companies – Next is cloud computing for SMBs, then cloud computing on mobile phones.
• Larry Ellison about cloud computing: “Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about.” I think I am an idiot, too.
• Microsoft Office Web Applications FAQ – Big mistake: Silverlight is not required.
• White paper: Microsoft Office SharePoint Online – 24 pages
• White paper: Microsoft Exchange Online Standard – 19 pages
• Windows Server 2008 R2 will be 64-bit only. Think about what this means for terminal services! Good point by Brian Madden
• Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008 have been released.

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Yesterday, I blogged about Windows Azure, which is one of the four components of the Azure Services Platform. Today, I will give a short introduction to the other services and share my opinion about their significance for Windows administrators.

The four services of the Azure Services Platform are: Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services.

Windows Azure

As I outlined yesterday, the term “Windows Azure” is a bit misleading. Essentially, Windows Azure is a cloud-based Web platform. Even though it is running on Windows Server 2008, it is not a cloud-based Windows edition. Perhaps this might change though. David Chappell mentioned that Microsoft might support unmanaged code on Windows Azure in the future. Perhaps this is a hint that non- web-related applications will one day run on Windows Azure. Then it could be possible that we can move our complete Windows backend to Microsoft’s datacenters.

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Most journalists were quite surprised when Microsoft announced its new cloud initiative Azure some days ago at the PDC 2008. I have read quite a few articles about this topic and it seems to me that most writers have problems in understanding what Azure really is. This explains why some of the articles contradict each other. I must admit that I still don’t understand it completely myself. The complexity of Microsoft’s new cloud platform is already amazing. All of the articles I have read have one thing in common, though. They all make us believe that a revolution is going on. In this article, I will try to clarify what Windows Azure is and what it is not.

There are quite a few fundamental concepts related to Microsoft’s cloud initiative: Azure Services Platform, Windows Azure, .NET services, Live Services and SQL Services. The most interesting question is how these relate to each other. Some journalists seem to believe that Windows Azure is the fundamental platform and all the other services run on top of it. This picture is supported by the following diagram, which can be found in many articles.

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