Azure: it’s Windows but not as we know it

If Microsoft Azure is just Windows in the cloud, is it easy to move a Windows application from your servers to Azure?

The answer is a definite “maybe”. An Azure instance is just a Windows virtual server, and you can even use a remote desktop to log in and have a look. Your ASP.NET code should run just as well on Azure as it does locally.

But there are caveats. The first is that all Azure instances are stateless. State must be stored in one of the Azure storage services.

Azure tables are a non-relational service that stores entities and properties. Azure blobs are for arbitrary binary data that can be served by a content distribution network. SQL Azure is a version of Microsoft’s SQL Server relational database. Read more...