What is Windows Azure? That's the question I was asking myself before I attended a Scottish Developers event at Microsoft's Edinburgh offices at Waverly Gate on Friday 9th September 2011.

Steve Plank gave an excellent talk on getting to grips with Windows Azure. Steve or Planky as he is known is a Microsoft Architect Evangelist.

So what is the Microsoft Windows Azure platform?

Windows Azure is a cloud infrastructure that allows organisation large and small to develop and deploy there application on IT infrastructure hosted and managed by Microsoft.

Some of the benefits of developing for the Azure platform are:

• You don't have to buy your own equipment
• Highly scalable – get a new instance of a server within 10 minutes
• High availability and failover services
• Pay for what you use when you use it – resources are charged by the hour
• You don't have to manage or maintain these servers

The Azure platform is group of technologies providing a specific set of services to application developers.

The Windows Azure platform has four parts:

• Windows Azure: A Windows environment for running applications and storing data on computers in Microsoft data centers.
• SQL Azure: Relational data services in the cloud based on SQL Server.
• Windows Azure AppFabric: Cloud-based infrastructure services for applications running in the cloud or on premises.
• Windows Azure Marketplace: An online service for purchasing cloud-based data and applications.

More information:

Microsoft Azure Home Page

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/

Follow this link to get more detailed article and details on the Microsoft Azure platform

Steve Planks Blog

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/plankytronixx/

On Steve's blog he provides lots of information regarding the Azure including bootcamps (including the Labs) on how to develop for the Azure platform and many more interesting topics.

Scottish Developers Website

http://scottishdevelopers.com/

The Scottish Developer is great organisation to be involved in and it allows developers to meet and share ideas.