Cloudy Thoughts

Welcome, to my site on Windows Azure. On this site you will find all the latest developments regarding this new Microsoft platform. Windows Azure is Microsoft’s platform for enabling application’s to be hosted in the Cloud. It’s an ‘operating system in the cloud’ that makes application’s very scalable and highly available. The Windows Azure platform makes deployment of application easy and application can quickly be scaled out. Because of the freedom to and ease of scaling out or in Windows Azure comes with a pay as you go pricing model, which means that you only pay for what you use.

Windows Azure not only offers the possibility to host applications in the cloud, it also provides storage space, an out-of-the-box service bus and claims-based identity (access control service). Microsoft is also the only cloud provider that offers customers SQL Server in the cloud in the form of SQL Azure.

Microsoft understands very well that customers are very to trust someone with their data and their intellectual property. That’s why all features can also be used separately as well as together so that customers can migrate to the cloud gradually as they require.

Because resources are shared they are put to use more efficiently thus decreasing the waste of energy that’s needed to run the servers in  datacenters. This is a big issue since 2.0% of all US electricity is used by datacenters. If every company owns it’s own datacenter and wants to ensure redundancy it will cost a lot of energy.

This website will provide you with more information on the subjects of Cloud Computing, Windows Azure Platform and Green Computing. There will be examples, tutorials, videos, tip & tricks, etc… You will get pricing information and guidelines on when to migrate to the cloud and also when not to migrate to the cloud. The cloud is certainly not for every application, but it does offer an exciting new way of hosting applications that are very scalable and highly available.