Beginning SharePoint 2013 Development

SHAREPOINT AND WINDOWS AZURE

SharePoint and Windows Azure are two sizeable platforms unto themselves. SharePoint is one of Microsoft’s leading server productivity platforms — the collaborative platform for the enterprise and the Web. Windows Azure is Microsoft’s operating system in the cloud. Separately, they have their own strengths, market viability, and developer following. Together, they provide many powerful benefits. For example:

• They help expand how and where you deploy your code and data.
• They increase opportunities to take advantage of the Windows Azure “metered usage” model while at the same time reducing the storage and failover costs of on-premises applications.
• They provide you with new business models and offerings that you can take to your customers to increase your own solution offerings.

SharePoint and Windows Azure have evolved quite a bit since mid-2010 (when Microsoft introduced the topic) into a mature set of integrated technologies. Figure 5-14 illustrates the fact that each of the three categories of Windows Azure can in some way, shape, or form be integrated with SharePoint. For example, within the IAAS category, you can stand up servers in Windows Azure with fully functional SharePoint farms (whether they are stand-alone servers or connected servers that include Web front ends, index servers, SQL Servers, and so on). You can see here it’s possible to support SharePoint for Internet Sites (FIS) sites, or Business Intelligence (BI) servers that run SQL ...