Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Azure Fundamentals

The first question most developers ask is, “What is Azure?” The answer is both simple and complex. At first glance, Azure is just a hosting model for your applications. This hosting model, however, is one built to provide an entirely new level of service to those applications it hosts. This is where Azure becomes interesting.

Yes, Azure is hosting. It is highly scalable (practically unlimited) data-center hosting to which you have immediate access to as little or as much as you want (depending on your needs and ability to pay). In fact, you can quickly (with a couple key strokes) scale up or down to meet demand. This is elastic scalability on demand. And, better yet, you have access to both emulate this data center and deploy ...