Windows Azure: Windows Azure is the Microsoft cloud computing platform which enables developers to quickly develop, deploy, and manage their applications hosted in a Microsoft data center. As a PAAS provider, Windows Azure not only takes care of the infrastructure, but will also help to manage higher level components including operating systems, runtimes, and middleware. Microsoft has invested heavily in Windows Azure over the past few years. Six data centers across three continents have been developed to serve millions of customers. They have been built with an optimized power efficiency mechanism, self-cooling containers, and hardware homogeneity, which differentiates them from other data centers.

SQL databases were one of the first workloads available when Microsoft first introduced the Azure public cloud service many years ago. Today there are several options for hosting cloud-based SQL databases, including both Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Creating an SQL database using PaaS is quick and simple, and will likely meet the needs of most basic applications. IaaS is more complex, requiring the creation of a virtual machine (VM). In the case of IaaS, however, it is infinitely easier to get an SQL server up and running as compared to running it on-premises. The time to provision a Windows Server 2012 R2 server running the latest version of SQL is less than five minutes, in fact. Also, and this is especially important for SQL servers, Azure VMs provide much more flexibility and scalability than most on-premises deployments.

Microsoft Codename are the codenames given by Microsoft to products it has in development, before these products are given the names by which they appear on store shelves. Many of these products (new versions of Windows in particular) are of major significance to the IT community, and so the terms are often widely used in discussions prior to the official release. Microsoft Codename "Dallas" is a new online data marketplace being developed. Tableau will connect to data you subscribe to at this new marketplace allowing you to import the data for analysis. Microsoft is in the final stages of preparing for their official release of Microsoft Codename "Dallas", and is transitioning the data formats from what was available in CTP2 (community technology preview) to the final data format which was introduced in CTP3. Tableau can connect to any CTP3 formatted data. You can access the marketplace now and select from the data that has been converted to the CTP3 format.

Windows Azure AppFabric is arguably the main feature set that truly sets Windows Azure apart from any cloud services on the market today. The AppFabric allows cloud users to hookup on-premises services to their cloud services, to secure cloud & on-premises services with new or existing security frameworks (identity based, active directory, or otherwise),cache Internet or other content, and on top of all that build out and enable composite application integration. At the same time that Windows Azure AppFabric is one of the main features that sets Windows Azure apart from the competition, it is often one of the most misunderstood or unknown parts of the entire offering. In this chapter I’ll cover the main parts of the AppFabric including the service bus, access control, caching, integration, and patterns for integrating composite applications.

Windows Azure provides supports various forms of permanent storage with differing capabilities. The Windows Azure Storage service provides cost-effective storage for up to 100 terabytes per storage account. It provides a Storage Client library which provides a high-level .NET wrapper to the RESTful interface. For Azure Table, this wrapper uses WCF Data Services. Other than to Azure Blob containers and blobs configured for public access, all storage operations against the Azure Storage Service are authenticated with two factor authentication involving the storage account name and key.

SQL Server running on Azure Virtual Machines enables you host your SQL Server databases in the Cloud. For example, you can migrate an on-premises database to an Azure VM preconfigured with Windows Server 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014 Enterprise edition. But there are many other possible scenarios, such as multi-machine configurations that support high