LinkShare Develops Marketing Application with Microsoft Cloud LinkShare is using Microsoft’s Cloud Services Platform to develop the next generation of online performance marketing application LinkShare Lightning. This online performance marketing firm decided to use Windows Azure after evaluating the cloud computing offerings from Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine. Microsoft claims its massively scalable and cost-effective cloud platform can enable customers to easily build, host and dynamically scale applications and services through the Microsoft data centers all across the world. LinkShare expects annual savings of up to several million dollars in hardware, software and development costs by using Windows
SQL Azure
Microsoft announced the release of the National Centre for Biotechnology Information Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (NCBI Blast) on Windows Azure at Supercomputing 2010. The new application enables a broader community of scientists to combine desktop resources with the power of cloud computing for biological research. Microsoft showcased the scale of the application on Windows Azure, demonstrating its use for 100 billion comparisons of protein sequences in a database managed by the NCBI. Search Engine Zips Through Data NCBI Blast on Azure enables researchers to take advantage of the scalability of the platform to perform analysis of vast proteomics and genomic
Microsoft Windows Azure Part IV Pricing: Microsoft is cognizant of the fact that its cloud services Windows Azure, SQL Azure etc., needs to be accessed by developers so that innovative applications can be built on the platform. Towards this, promotional attractive offers consisting of a lot of compute hours were provided in the past, including the CTP Community Technology Preview. There are continuous requests from this community that prolonged free access should be provided; recently Amazon Web Services came up with micro instances at 3 cents per hour for Windows instances and there had been no matching announcements from Microsoft.
Microsoft Windows Azure Part III Read Part 2 Microsoft SQL Azure: Microsoft SQL Azure, another cloud service from Microsoft, brings robust RDBMS – Relational Database Management System, on pay per use basis. SQL Azure is a cloud database utility service from Microsoft data centers. SQL Azure can be used by both Cloud based Applications and Local Applications. SQL Azure makes use of the Microsoft SQL Server software which is one of the largest used RDBMS in the world. High Availability and Fault Tolerance are the hallmark features of Microsoft SQL database. The major benefits of SQL Azure include rapid provisioning,
Microsoft Windows Azure Part II Continued from Part 1 Storage: The ability to execute the code is the fundamental requirement; applications need persistent storage to hold the code information when they are not running. As we saw in AWS, S3 or Simple Storage Service, Windows Azure has storage service. Also, Microsoft has another cloud service called SQL Azure which we will take it up later. The simple way to store in Windows Azure is to use BLOBS. A separate storage account needs to be created. In this account data is stored in containers. A single account can contain many containers
