Offering the last amount of flexibility are the SaaS Windows Azure Websites.
This service allows you to build a scalable website using any operating system and ASP.Net, PHP, or Node.js and then deploy this website on the cloud.
You manage the web environment using Microsoft Internet Information Service (IIS).
You can either create a new website directly in the cloud, or you can move an existing IIS web site onto Windows Azure.
You can have multiple instances of the website running, and you can remove or add these instances even as the website is running.
Additionally, Azure allows you to load balance the requests to the website across the various instances for higher performance.
Windows Azure provides you with the types of services that you can tailor to your needs.
In fact, you can use one, two, or all three of these types of services in conjunction depending on your needs.
Moreover, at all times Windows Azure has focused on providing a highly reliable cloud solution to you.
As such, your VMs and applications are spread out across various locations and replicated for redundancy to safeguard against
hardware failures and other such disasters.
At times you may want to have parts of your solution hosted on Azure but the remainder of it on premises. The
AppFabric is the glue that connects these parts together by allowing you to integrate the Windows Azure applications
with the on-premises application.
You can leverage the Service Bus to enable communication between the cloud and on-premise applications.
Alternatively, you can use the AppFabric’s Access Control Service to create highly secure authorization for applications. Essentially, the AppFabric is a framework for managing and monitoring the applications running in the cloud.
