My knowledge of Windows Azure is limited to the several videos I watched on Microsoft's web site. Aside from a few new buzzwords, I'm not seeing how this platform differentiates from traditional web hosts that have existed for many years. Aside from the unique billing model (e.g. "storage transactions per month"), what differentiates Azure from traditional web hosts, such as discountasp.net, in terms of the actual service provided?
Flexibility and Scalability: There are two ways to scale a traditional infrastructure: purchase physical hardware or virtualize. Whereas Azure provides the ability to quickly build, deploy and manage applications or systems as it best serves the business.
Technically Windows Azure Platform and Windows Azure are different. Windows Azure Platform is a platform offering services such as Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and AppFabric. Windows Azure is the Microsoft's cloud OS and is a part of the Azure platform.
Microsoft Azure Azure is cloud-based machines, networks and storage. In more technical language, whereas Microsoft 365 is SaaS, Azure is both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS), depending on what it is used for.
Azure is the best destination for Windows Server. Whether you're migrating as is or modernizing applications, Azure offers native support for SQL, . NET, Remote Desktop Services, and other Windows Server workloads.
The extra services that takes cloud computing(Azure) one step beyond traditional hosting? Here are a few:
Load balancing: a flexible set of computing resources can all be transparently load-balanced behind a virtual router.
Content Delivery: the work done by a content delivery network can all be done transparently by a cloud computing provider, such as Amazon CloudFront.
Failover: if your data is load-balanced between multiple data centers, and one data center goes offline, a cloud computing provider should be able to failover the traffic from one to the others. (If they can't now, they should provide this service. :))
Scalability: the number of compute resources used should automatically scale up or down based on demand.
Tooling: with the advent of mainstream cloud computing providers, the tooling has improved tremendously. For example, Windows Azure tools allow developers to test everything out locally and easily deploy to the cloud, and thus enabling people to easily build scalable services.
As Sachin pointed out, there are several core concepts to Azure that benefit you beyond something such as DiscountAsp. I'd like to point out a few more Azure-specific nuances. These benefits typically apply whether you have one instance or multiple - it's just that you might experience a slight bit of downtime if certain events cause a redeploy of your app.
There are probably a few more benefits of Azure over discount web hosting, but that should give you a good start.
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