Understanding the basic scenarios of Windows Azure will help us understand its use. Additionally, it will help us understand the services offered. Three basic scenarios are discussed here. In addition to the following scenarios, there can be many more ways of using Azure services based on the needs of clients, but all the basic uses are covered below.

Software Development

Software development is the most popular use of Windows Azure. Software is developed and tested on local development fabric and then deployed in the Windows Azure cloud. Azure hosts the web application and also the supporting processes, communicating with other web services.

Testing applications in the software development phase usually becomes very time-consuming for developers, if they need to change the configurations of the environment being used to host the application. In Windows Azure, this is the not a problem as resources are absolutely in their control and can be modified as needed by the application. Once a web application is hosted in the Windows Azure cloud, it is ready to be used by the end users and organizations.

Moreover, deploying an application is very easy in Windows Azure using the tools provided. These tools are MS deploy, PowerShell, and integration with Team Foundation Server (TFS). Visual Studio cloud projects are also an easy place to deploy an application.

An application is tested in the staging environment and then it is deployed in the production environment for end users to use it.

Enterprise Process Offloading

There are situations when an organization may need to reduce loads from its on-premises systems for a certain period of time or on a regular basis. This could be easily achieved by using Windows Azure services at a very low cost. Clients only have to pay for transactions made on their application instead of paying entirely for hardware and software.

This is an extremely cost-efficient way of using new resources for the organization. Azure, in this context, offers quite quick growth to businesses by leveraging cloud resources when needed.

Enterprise Application Integration

This service enables a connection between applications even if they are following different transport protocols. The process can also validate and extract properties, as required by the application at the receiving end. In a normal scenario, where communication is needed between applications of two organizations, the interaction has to bypass the firewall by completing due process. However, in the service offered by Windows Azure, the communication between applications does not need to bypass the organization’s firewall.

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