A Windows Azure screenshot (Microsoft Cloud Computing)

By Leonardo Herrero

Azure is the cloud service platform from Microsoft. Its cloud computing features can be divided into 3 different services:

Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas): It includes services like virtual machines, Big compute, Storage, backup and recovery.
Platform as a service (Paas): This is the most interesting for developers. It provides several services to improve and facilitate application development. Cloud services are the main feature here.
Software as a Service (Saas): It is more visible for end users who directly consume these services like Email, CRM, Collaborative, ERP.

Cloud computing has become extremely popular, mainly because of its advantages over on-premises computing.

Automated: You can easily manage and automate almost everything they provide. From azure SQL backups to computing processing.
Usage based: You pay only for what you use.
Elastic: You can easily scale according your needs.
Managed resources: You can administrate all you have from your control panel anywhere.

Microsoft keeps all these services replicated in bigs datacenters like this one:

Actually Microsoft adds new datacenters from time to time. Since July 2014 is available a new Microsoft Azure datacenter in the southern region of Brazil (São Paulo). This is great news and means we have the first Microsoft Azure datacenter in Latin America where we can host our services.

Here is a map with all the current availables datacenters all over the world:

United States		Europe		Asia Pacific
Azure Region	Location	Azure Region	Location	Azure Region	Location
US Central	Iowa	Europe North	Ireland	Asia Pacific East	Hong Kong
US East	Virginia	Europe West	Netherlands	Asia Pacific Southeast	Singapore
US East 2	Virginia
US North Central	Illinois
US South Central	Texas
US West	California

Japan		Brazil
Azure Region	Location	Azure Region	Location
Japan East	Saitama Prefecture	Brazil South	Sao Paulo State
Japan West	Osaka Prefecture

Usefull links:

Click here if you want to check their prices. They provide a online calculator: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/

Click here if you want to ckeck the status of their services in the different datacenters: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/#current

Leonardo Herrero is a .NET Systems Engineer with more than 8 years of experience in software development. He is particularly interested in the architecture of information systems. Leonardo is proficiency with various Frameworks, code generators and CASE tools. He always eager to learn and explore new technologies.