Windows Azure and Cloud Computing

 Windows Azure is an operating system for the cloud that completely abstracts the physical components of the system: the developer, as the customer, chooses the features, the components, and the level of Service Level Agreement (SLA) without the configuring of hardware or software on the assigned machines.

In windows azure the data stored is replicated to three nodes. The load balancer works in a transparent way. At the writing the code, for computational power, users or customer can choose a wide range of 5 five virtual machines types that can be described using on these components

CPUs

One can range from a single processor at 1 GHz and greater to 8 cores if you want to leverage vertical parallelism.

RAM

 Choose the size you need. The available range starts at 768 MB and goes up to 8 GB. You do not have to choose the vendor, the speed, or other characteristics.

 Instance storage

Disk space starts at 20 GB and can expand to 2 terabytes per instance. You do not need to choose the speed, the controller, or the type of redundancy.

  I/O performance

The choice is straightforward: low, moderate, or high.

The subscription fee can include some or all of these features. When a customer exceeds its limits, the billing system starts charging the surplus. Moreover, these features include everything you need. In five minutes, you can be up and running with a service or an application on the Windows Azure platform. Microsoft azure certification exam also helps to improve the knowledge on Microsoft azure

If you want to scale up, you can choose from a simple configuration file to increase the number of machines you are using, and within about five minutes, you obtain more machines. If you want to reduce your computing power, you can reduce the number of instances at any time. The billing system will stop charging for dismissed instances immediately. You can also change the machine size at any time; however, it takes a slightly longer period of time to restart the service, because the platform needs you to redeploy the application. Such a redeployment operation usually takes about five minutes, after which you are up and running with new instances on new machines. Costs are proportional to the chosen configuration, but—and this is significant—you can change the configuration as needed. Every technical aspect of the deployment is Microsoft's responsibility. Fortunately, no one knows Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2 (the operating system on which Windows Azure is currently based at the time of this writing) better than Microsoft, and no one knows the .NET Framework internals, the operating system kernel, the IIS components, Microsoft SQL Server, and so on, better than Microsoft.

Similarly, for maintenance and security, no one can apply patches faster than Microsoft. Even if your administrators check newsletters or read feeds 24 hours a day, they will always be second to the Microsoft team, which applies patches to the Windows Azure platform automatically as soon as they become available. Your application is deployed using a model that describes the application's needs. Developers can request a certain amount of disk space, and Windows Azure provides it automatically. However, you cannot request a specific SCSI (small computer system interface) controller or a RAID5 configuration—but you don't typically need to do that. The only thing you need to do is ensure that the application has sufficient disk space. If you achieve the required performance for your applications, because redundancy and scalability are assured, you don't need to know all the internal details. There is no added application value in knowing disk types. Moreover, you can avoid the inherent risks of choosing the wrong disks. Further azure training helps to know about the deployment In windows azure.

Conclusion: if you wish to learn on to choose on career in Microsoft azure. You can also learn on azure interview questions. This will help to the interview.