Chapter 3. How Windows Azure works

This chapter covers

  • How Microsoft built Azure
  • What a cloud operating system is
  • How your application is provisioned and managed in the cloud

Now that you have a basic understanding of what you can do with Azure, let’s drill deeper into the pieces of Azure and how to best work with them. In this chapter, we’ll discuss how Windows Azure is architected and how it does the cloud magic that it does. Understanding this background will help you develop better services, be a better person, and get the most out of your Azure infrastructure.

3.1. The big shift

When Azure was first announced at the PDC in 2008, Microsoft wasn’t a recognized player in the cloud industry. It was the underdog to the giants Google and Amazon, ...

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