Microsoft’s Cloud-base Operating System

Microsoft’s Cloud-base Operating System

Microsoft has released it’s first cloud-based operating system ‘Windows Azure’ in fabruary. The Azure Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, to provide an operating system and developer services that can be used individually or together.

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft datacenters.

Windows Azure is a flexible platform that supports multiple languages and integrates with your existing on-premises environment. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP. It is Microsoft's first step into cloud computing.

The hosting environment of Windows Azure is called the Fabric Controller - which pools individual systems into a network that automatically manages resources, load balancing, geo-replication and application lifecycle without requiring the hosted apps to explicitly deal with those requirements. In addition, it also provides other services that most applications require — such as the Windows Azure Storage Service that provides applications with the capability to store unstructured data such as binary large objects, queues, drives and non-relational tables. Applications can also use other services that are a part of the Azure Services Platform.

Windows 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 Windows Azure Hypervisor to provide virtualization of services..