Features of Windows Azure that you are unaware of

Window Azure, a cloud OS has taken the world like a storm. With its multidisciplinary features and services, focusing on the needs of the present day enterprises which are striving in such a competitive and tight bound industry, the Azure is becoming a favorite of various enterprises, and their IT department to be exact. Hence we thought it made the most sense if we covered its various features and services, and help the users who are still in the dark, to get familiar with this amazing service.   

So let us now take on to each and every feature and service provided by Window Azure. Kindly read ahead.

WEBSITES

This feature of Window Azure allows the users to quickly organize various highly scalable websites. It also enables the users to use various languages and open source applications and organized various type of content using TFS, FTP and GIT. And that’s not all, with Window Azure you get various integration services, such as that with SQL Database, Content Delivery Network (CDN) Caching and Storage.

It will turn out to be a rather intelligent and cost saving investment, if you decide to develop the website using Window Azure. With scalability being its chief fetching feature, you get to extend the utility of the website as the traffic on your website increases. Also, if you wish to get one of those ephemeral websites, the ones which are always transitory and are often used only to promote a particular content or event or campaign etc, this is the best set of features that you will get to run the same.

VIRTUAL MACHINES

A much awaited retreat, the Virtual Machines is the chicken soup for the employees who have lost much of their sleep (and hair maybe) trying to figure out a way to deal with IaaS and Virtual Machines. With this, the IT department can easily provision infrastructure and organized various virtual machines, as per the demand. With the capabilities provided by Azure’s VM, you would hardly require a few minutes to configure Linux and Window Server in Cloud. Also, you can easily migrate the workload, shorten the processes, push notifications and a lot more, without even having to change the source code.

MOBILE SERVICES

This is by far one of the most precise and well structured turn key available for developing mobile applications. With help of mobile services from Azure, you can easily accelerate the mobile applications development process, incorporate structure storage, deploy user authentication, and push notifications and a lot more. Use it and you would know how effortless and seamless mobile application development has now evolved to become.

MEDIA SERVICES

As media becomes increasingly an important tool for the promotion and delivery, both in terms of social settings and professional, Window Azure’s Media Services come as a package poised for flourishing business opportunities and growth prospects. It has every right tool and protocol intact in its right place, which can be used to deliver content to a variety of devices such as iOS, Mac OS, Windows phone and Windows 8, Xbox, and Andorid etc. At the same time it ingests, encodes, converts and protects the content with various live and on demand streaming services.

CLOUD SERVICES

The cloud service being offered by PaaS, provides you with a runtime environment available on demand. The published API makes it rather simpler for the developers to develop or extend the pre existing enterprise applications. The applications thus scaled in Window Azure via PaaS are delivered to the clients as a SaaS solution.

BIG DATA

Managing the over explosion of data is one of the prime challenges faced by today’s enterprises. The boom in the field of social media networking sites and the increasing use of smart phones have now exposed the industry with a boom of data, which not only requires storage and processing but also analyzing and a system to derive useful information out of the data.

Faced with such a hard pressing and colossal need of the reality, Window Azure has now made available a complete 100% Apache Hadoop compatible, HD insight service which is ready to be used by any enterprise and delivers a wide range of structured and unstructured options for storing data. Also are available various tools to analyze the data and extract significant portions of it.

It may not look like an overnight solution to the colossal problem, but definitely is a step ahead in the direction. Like the optimists often are heard pitching – something is better than nothing and this, is definitely a lot more than something.