Windows Azure

The book I read to research this post was Introducing Windows Azure For IT Professionals Technical Overview by Mitch Tulloch which is a very good book which I downloaded for free from kindle. There is a version in book form of this and Microsoft Press have released it free on kindle so people who are likely to implement Azure have a way of getting up to speed without having to shell out loads of money. There have apparently been 750 thousand downloads and of course there are lots of more specialist books about Azure by Microsoft Press that people can but. It is an online database that is a cloud computing offering and strictly speaking the software is run on the online server and you are not given a disc to run on a local machine so it isn't classed as a hybrid cloud. It works with Windows 2012 R2 & other software such as Sharepoint. Microsoft are constantly bringing out add ons for this online service such as Biz Talk and also it does all work with some versions of Linux. A lot of people use the Visual Studio Online Cloud Service with Azure as it lets them write their own addons and customize it. A lot of people use Hadoop with the database and I think that also works with the Amazon Web databases. There are 8 regional data centers around the world and in Europe they are based at Dublin & Amsterdam. This book is a decent length and goes into using Azure in quite a lot of detail. When using the cloud service your first 5 GB is free but you are also charged on things like the number of instances running. For a company it is quite competitive when you consider the cost of having an onsite server and things like software to. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book although in places it was a little tricky to understand but I definitely recommend downloading it on kindle and Microsoft are releasing free e-books about a lot of their products which I will be reviewing and would recommend.