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Software + Services - What is it all about?

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Microsoft recently announced Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform at PDC. Many of you might wonder how this is related to Software + Services and what the scenarios in which developers benefit most from Azure.

First I want to highlight the benefits for Software + Services such as delivering a consistent user-experience and access to data from all devices : Web, Desktop and Mobile.

This consistent experience is well illustrated in the following clip and with Live Mesh.

So what the heck is Windows Azure all about?

Windows Azure is basically a way for developers to get scalability and availability of web applications and services in the cloud. Windows Azure gives you load balancers, multiple servers, automatic deployment a fail-safe data back-end, monitoring, live-updates at the clock of a button. It frees you from all the administration, planning and licensing complexity involved with running a server farm in a data center.

So what the heck is the whole Azure Services Platform about?

The Azure Services Platform consists of Windows Azure, SQL Services, .NET Services, Live Services and a lot more. The idea is to provide you with all the back-end services that you would normally have in your own data center (relational storage, enterprise service bus etc.) but to extend those to embrace the Web as well: E.g. the Live Mesh provides ability to run your applications directly in the live desktop and Live Framework enables your application to use data-sync with the Live data-back-end. Thus you get synched data without providing all the infrastructure and servers yourself.

Using the Azure Platform makes creating web applications and services that need 24/7 uptime a whole lot easier.

Please enjoy a few more videos to learn from:

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