Introduction

The Directions on Microsoft Azure Roadmap summarizes the components and services of Azure, Microsoft’s hosted application and storage services offering. It summarizes each service, explains its benefits, risks, and pricing metrics, and projects its near-term technical roadmap where possible. Organizations considering Azure can use the report to evaluate where its services might fit into their own environments, while organizations already on Azure can use it as a guide to the future evolution of its services.

Azure has evolved substantially since it became commercially available in Feb. 2010. It consists of dozens of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) components. Customers can leverage Azure’s massive scale and geographic reach for solutions in diverse areas, including virtual machine (VM) and Web site hosting, mobile application services, relational and nonrelational storage, and disaster recovery. Azure supports many non-Microsoft technologies, including Linux and Java. Services are added and updated frequently, so current and potential customers may find new opportunities by conducting regular Azure evaluations.