Chris Alexander
26th February, 2010
Windows Azure Series
Welcome to the third in a series of posts on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. Check out the others on Cloud Computing (#2533) and Getting Started (#2541).
Now that we’ve covered the foundations of Windows Azure, and some great resources on getting started building your Azure applications, I wanted to have a look at those little things that make this all the more impressive and enjoyable to work with.
Believe it or not, considering how little control you have over the servers, there is quite a lot of very cool and useful things you can drop on to Azure and get it to do.
For example, you can run Memcache, the distributed caching program, in Azure. Thanks to Dom Green for getting that going.
You can also do some extremely cool stuff (via some elite tinkering) to get FastCGI languages (think PHP) running on Azure - find out more here.
Combine this with what I’ve already written, and you have a powerful and multi-purpose platform that you can tailor to your needs, that will scale with your business, and give you the power you need without the hassle that you don’t.
To give you an idea of what’s possible with Azure (and Silverlight), check out Eye On Earth, a global environment monitor.
For loads more information on Azure, check out Dom Green’s blog (the UK’s resident Azure expert), the official Azure blog and website, or the Azure tag.