Azure Boosted with IaaS

The Windows Azure hosted public cloud platform offers key new services that have gone into production in 2013, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings that host customers’ virtual machines in Microsoft data centers, tools that accelerate the implementation of mobile applications that use Azure, and a simplified way to host Web sites. Other recent Azure improvements include new connectivity choices and a U.S. government certification. Continual updates show Microsoft’s commitment to keep Azure competitive and remove barriers for customer adoption. The IaaS additions, in particular, could make Azure more attractive than previously to organizations migrating to the cloud and development teams testing software.

IaaS Features Ease Transition to Cloud, Help Dev Teams

When Azure became commercially available in Feb. 2010, it offered a Platform as a Service (PaaS) architecture, in which Microsoft rents out computer resources to run customer applications and takes responsibility for managing not only the hardware but also the OS and platform software running on the computers. Azure’s PaaS offerings reduce the management burden on customers and enable new application efficiencies but often require applications to be rewritten to be compatible with, and to take full advantage of, the platform’s capabilities.