In February 2010 Microsoft released it’s cloud computing platform Windows Azure. Windows Azure is a set of services that gives .NET developers the tools to build applications that run on a cloud. Upon hearing this I immediately sat down to write some Windows Azure code. The only problem was I really had no idea what the heck cloud computing is used for! Almost everything that I had read about cloud computing boiled down to moving a companies or cities email to Gmail, but what I found is there is so much more.
At first glance Windows Azure looks like a web hosting environment that is managed by Microsoft. After a deeper dive Windows Azure is much more than that.
So what are the differences?
1.) One of the greatest advantages of hosting or cloud computing is the outsourcing of hardware management. An enterprise can sleep a little better at night by trusting their hardware needs to companies that specialize and can guarantee up time. At a normal web hosting company you pay a fee for a fixed number of time, usually in months. The fee is based on how much bandwidth and storage space they allot for you. If you need more bandwidth it can be increased for a larger fee. Windows Azure is a little different. With Windows Azure you pay for bandwidth only as it is being used. Windows Azure also allows you to scale your hosting environment during peak times. If you are an online flower company you can ratchet up the bandwidth being used at Valentine’s day and other flower heavy holidays. Once those peak times have passed the bandwidth can be lowered therefore saving some money.
2.) When using a web hosting company you can put up any code that you want. Whether it is scalable or not is strictly left up to the person writing the code. Windows Azure is a little bit different. When writing code to run against Windows Azure the patterns that you are forced to follow to make it compatible ensure that it is scalable. Just by using Windows Azure you are ensuring that your solution will scale and take advantage of the scaling features that Windows Azure provides.
3.) Web hosting provides a place to host a website and possibly even a database. Windows Azure can also be a place to host a website and store relational data, but it actually provides much more. Windows Azure allows you to run applications out on a cloud. Thick client applications, WPF applications, Silverlight applications and Mobile applications can all communicate withWindows Azure. Background services that update data in the database can be run on the Windows Azure platform as well. A Silverlight application that does a lot of heavy processing could make use of Windows Azure by doing the processing on the could, but still be hosted on a normal web server.
These are just a few of the many differences between web hosting and the Windows Azure platform.