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copied!<p>I've just been listening to the <a href="http://deepfriedbytes.com/podcast/episode-20-windows-azure-the-overlord-in-the-cloud/" rel="noreferrer">Deep Fried Bytes Podcast #20</a> wherein, they interview Steve Marx, the Windows Azure Program Manager, and he explains it all.</p> <p>From what I can gather thus far (haven't finished all the podcast) it works like this:</p> <ol> <li><p>Microsoft have a ton servers running Hyper-V which can run virtualized instances of windows server 2008</p></li> <li><p>You can start/stop/reboot an arbitrary number of these virtual win2k8 servers using an API, and you get charged only based on what you use.</p></li> <li><p><strong>The platform which controls this start/stop/reboot/crash recovery/provisioning/billing/etc is Windows Azure</strong>. They jokingly refer to it as the 'windows server overlord'</p></li> <li><p>You define roles for these VM's, which can be either</p> <ul> <li>web-role, in which you can run any .NET code hosted inside IIS (eg: ASP.NET, httpHandler, etc), </li> <li>worker-role, in which you run some standalone .NET code for background processing and so on</li> <li>Perhaps more roles once they come out of CTP</li> </ul></li> <li><p>You can use the windows azure API's to start/stop them - eg: "Give me 5 instances of my web role and 3 instances of my worker role"</p></li> <li><p>Data gets stored by their storage services, and can be</p> <ul> <li>Blobs (I'm assuming something like S3)</li> <li>Queues (I'm assuming something like SQS)</li> <li>Tables - marx mentioned a 'web scale non-relational data store' - something like SimpleDB or BigTable</li> </ul></li> <li><p>These VM's have a bunch of other services available to them - Live Services for windows live stuff, .NET services, SQL Services if you need a full-blown SQL server for relational data, Sharepoint services if you want sharepoint, etc.</p></li> <li><p><strong>All this stuff rolled up together is the Windows Azure Services Platform</strong></p></li> </ol> <p>My take - Giant Marketing fail. Confusion abounds. MS seem to always do this kind of 'roll it all up into a single buzzword' thing though (.NET 5 years ago, anyone?). I really wish they would stop it</p>

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