Programming Microsoft's Clouds: Windows Azure™ and Office 365

Chapter 17

When to Use Azure Versus Office 365

What’s In This Chapter

• The flexibility of each service
• Azure and Office 365 identity federation
• How each service handles identity federation
• The productivity features each service offers
• Understanding cross-platform considerations
• What you can expect with the service-level agreement
• The development tools you can use with each service

Both Microsoft Azure and Office 365 are Microsoft cloud-based service offerings that cater toward different business needs. Microsoft Azure essentially provides IaaS and PaaS service offerings, which makes it a broader cloud platform. Office 365 is basically a SaaS offering which provides features such as collaboration, messaging, and communication. The sections in this chapter cover various facets of each service, so you know how to use each appropriately. Figure 17-1 illustrates how the two services differ.

Figure 17-1

Which Service is More Flexible?

Microsoft Azure enables businesses to develop, deploy, and scale cloud-based solutions with different agility needs. With Azure you get the flexibility to choose the technology on which to build solutions (for example, PHP, ASP.NET, and so on) and you can also easily scale your solutions both up and down based on your needs (for example, using different number of worker roles at different times).

With Office 365 you get relatively less flexibility to ...