3. WINDOWS AZURE PLATFORM
The Windows Azure platform is composed of many different services. You
can leverage them in your application design, deployment, and
management. Figure 4 shows the different layers
within Windows Azure: Data, Service, and Integration (the Client layer
is any application that consumes the services within Windows Azure).
Data Layer
Within the Data layer are a number of
different types of data storage mechanisms (or features that map
directly to data storage) — both nonrelational and relational. The nonrelational
storage features enable you to store assets such as virtual machine
images (Drive) or images or videos (Blobs), create nonrelational
tables, manage message queues along a service bus, and manage data
caching in your distributed applications. The relational
data features include the core Windows Azure SQL Database (think of
this as the cloud version for the on-premises SQL Server), along with
reporting services (SQL Reporting) and the ability to stream near
real-time data streams from data transactions (Stream Insight).
Services Layer
The Services layer contains a number of
default services that you can use when building your solutions, ranging
from Media Services to core Cloud Services (including creating websites
and Worker role classes, as well as leveraging Hadoop on Windows Azure
to process Big Data requests). For many of these services, you can use
baked-in functionality and a set of APIs within your application. For
example, if you want to build a multimedia learning solution, you could
leverage the Media Services to upload WMVs, transcode them to MP4s,
save them to BLOB storage, create a public URL for access, and then
stream them from Windows Azure to SharePoint.
Integration Layer
The Integration layer contains
some fundamental services such as a geo-replicated content delivery
network (CDN) or Traffic Manager — these are often core platform
capabilities. Other important integration services are in this layer,
too, such as Virtual Private Network (which enables you to connect a
virtual machine to your on-premises system) or workflow and business
process and integration services. All of these capabilities enable you
to integrate systems or secure them.
