Windows Azure Platform: An Open and Interoperable Approach

As an open platform, the Windows Azure platform allows developers to use multiples languages and development tools to build applications. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the Windows Azure platform supports multiple Internet protocols including HTTP, XML, SOAP and REST.

Standards and Developer Choice

Cloud Platforms should support commonly accepted standards and may lead to the creation of new standards. Windows Azure platform provides a standards-based environment in that any of the Windows Azure platform services can be called from other platforms and programming languages:

  1. Service Access by providing these Open Standards: REST, SOAP and XML
  2. Service Authentication by providing these Federated Identity Standards: SAML and OAuth
  3. Data Portability by supporting web protocols and open specifications like: OData and TDS
  4. Programming Languages and Runtimes: .NET, Java, PHP, and Ruby
  5. Developer tools : Visual Studio, Eclipse and command-line tools for PHP
  6. Windows Azure platform SDKs for multiple languages: C#, PHP, Java, and Ruby

REST-Based APIs

Windows Azure platform supports REST-Based APIs, thus facilitating broad access.

Windows Azure Storage Services may be accessed from within a service running in Windows Azure, or directly over the Internet from any application that can send an HTTP/HTTPS request and receive an HTTP/HTTPS response.

The REST APIs for Windows Azure Storage Services exposes Storage Account, Blob Service, Queue Service, and Table Service.

Open Data Protocole OData

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a web protocol for querying and updating data over the Web. OData is a REST-based protocol whose core focus is to maximize the interoperability between data services and clients that wish to access that data. It is thus being used to expose data from a variety of sources, from relational databases and file systems to content management systems and traditional websites.

OData targets Web applications, regardless of implementation technology. OData is supported by many Microsoft products, including Windows Azure Storage, SQL Server 2008 R2, Excel 2010, SharePoint 2010, and WCF Data Services.

For example, Open Data Protocol (OData) client libraries are available for:

Execute Native Code

Windows Azure platform computing paradigm is based on the exchange and execution of arbitrary code written using non-Microsoft programming languages with Full-Trust. In a full-trust environment, any code the developer compiles is allowed to run on the local computer.

Windows Azure platform supports running the code in your Web roles under Full-Trust. This capability unlocks a number of compelling scenarios such as use native code via spawning processes or Platform Invoke (P/Invoke), use .NET Libraries that require Full Trust, provide Inter-process Communication via Named Pipes.

FastCGI

The FastCGI protocol support in Windows Azure hosting environment enables developers to run web applications that are written using dynamic programming languages (e.g., PHP, Ruby). For more information, see Hosting FastCGI Applications.



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