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Windows Azure Services for Windows Server Web Sites Cloud

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Windows Azure Services for Windows Server Web Sites was developed as part of the Microsoft Cloud OS initiative and allows Hosting Service Providers to easily provision multi-tenant website hosting services on Windows Server 2012 machines in their datacenter. Web sites running on a Windows Server Web Site Cloud are highly scalable, accommodate multiple tenants, and can be deployed and administered with ease using the Service Management Administration Portal.

Key Benefits of Windows Server Web Sites

One of the first Cloud services developed for Windows Server 2012 as a result of the Cloud OS initiative, Windows Server Web Sites provides outstanding platform consistency with Windows Azure Web Sites. End users familiar with developing applications for Windows Azure Web Sites will feel right at home working with the new Web Sites Cloud OS service. While the benefits of platform consistency between Cloud OS services and Windows Azure cannot be overstated, it should be noted that the Service Management Tenant Portal used by Web Sites can be fully customized and extended to meet particular branding, billing, or integration requirements. In fact, one of the primary design goals for the tenant portal was to ensure that the portal could be easily configured as part of a non-branded or generic “white label” cloud hosting solution. In addition to platform consistency, Web Sites provide several other benefits for tenants including:

  • Rapid application development - Tenants can quickly create solutions based on popular web applications in the Web App Gallery, in as little as 5 minutes. Windows Server Web Sites also provides native application support for Microsoft Visual Studio and WebMatrix.

  • Ease of deployment – Windows Server Web Sites supports source code control using FTP, WebDeploy and GIT.

  • Database support – Windows Server Web Sites supports the use of both SQL Server and MySQL databases.

  • Instant Scale - Users can quickly scale web applications by changing the value specified for Web Site Mode from Intro Shared to Basic Shared or Reserved. Reserved web site mode ensures that web applications have exclusive access to a web site’s resources. Web sites configured to run in reserved web site mode can utilize additional resources by increasing the Instance Size of the web site from the default value of Small to Medium or Large.

    Web applications can also be scaled by changing a web site’s Instance Count from the default value of 1 instance to 2 or even 3 instances. A web site’s Instance Count can be changed independent of the Web Site Mode configured for the web site.

  • Support for multiple frameworks – Windows Server Web Sites supports newer frameworks such as ASP.NET MVC 4, Node.js and PHP as well as legacy frameworks ASP.NET 2.0 and classic ASP.