WINDOWS AZURE PLATFORM
The Windows Azure platform is composed of many different services. You can leverage them in your application design, deployment, and management. Figure 5-4 shows the different layers within Windows Azure: Data, Service, and Integration (the Client layer is any application that consumes the services within Windows Azure).
Data Layer
Within the Data layer are a number of different types of data storage mechanisms (or features that map directly to data storage) — both nonrelational and relational. The nonrelational storage features enable you to store assets such as virtual machine images (Drive) or images or videos (Blobs), create nonrelational tables, manage message queues along a service bus, and manage data caching in your distributed applications. The relational data features include the core Windows Azure SQL Database (think of this as the cloud version for the on-premises SQL Server), along with reporting services (SQL Reporting) and the ability to stream near real-time data streams from data transactions (Stream Insight). Throughout this chapter and indeed your broader development efforts you can use these core Windows Azure services in many different ways when building SharePoint applications — from learning solutions that leverage Media Services to synchronizing data in the cloud using the SQL Data Sync Service. A diverse set of services are available to build a wide array of applications.
Services Layer
The Services layer contains a number of default services that you can use when building your solutions, ranging from Media Services to core Cloud Services (including creating websites and Worker role classes, as well as leveraging Hadoop on Windows Azure to process Big Data requests). For many of these services, you can use baked-in functionality and a set of APIs within your application. For example, if you want to build a multimedia learning solution, you could leverage the Media Services to upload WMVs, transcode them to MP4s, save them to BLOB storage, create a public URL for access, and then stream them from Windows Azure to SharePoint.
Integration Layer
The Integration layer contains some fundamental services such as a geo-replicated content delivery network (CDN) or Traffic Manager — these are often core platform capabilities. Other important integration services are in this layer, too, such as Virtual Private Network (which enables you to connect a virtual machine to your on-premises system) or workflow and business process and integration services. All of these capabilities enable you to integrate systems or secure them.