Cloud Computing publication categorizer

Software industry is heading towards centralized computing.
Due to this trend data and programs are being taken away
from traditional desktop PCs and placed in compute clouds
instead. Compute clouds are enormous server farms packed
with computing power and storage space accessible through
the Internet. Instead of having to manage one’s own infras-
tructure to run applications, server time and storage space
can can be bought from an external service provider. From
the customers’ point of view the benefit behind this idea is to
be able to dynamically adjust computing power up or down
to meet the demand for that power at a particular moment.
This kind of flexibility not only ensures that no costs are in-
curred by excess processing capacity, but also enables hard-
ware infrastructure to scale up with business growth. Be-
cause of growing interest in taking advantage of cloud com-
puting a number of service providers are working on provid-
ing cloud services. As stated in [7], Amazon, Salerforce.com
and Google are examples of firms that already have working
solutions on the market. Recently also Microsoft released a
preview version of its cloud platform called the Azure. Early
adopters can test the platform and development tools free of
charge.[2, 3, 4]
The main purpose of this paper is to shed light on the inter-
nals of Microsoft’s Azure platform. In addition to examining
how Azure platform works, the benefits of Azure platform
are explored. The most important benefit in Microsoft’s solu-
tion is that it resembles existing Windows environment a lot.
Developers can use the same application programming inter-
faces (APIs) and development tools they are already used to.
The second benefit is that migrating applications to cloud is
easy. This partially stems from the fact that Azure’s services
can be exploited by an application whether it is run locally
or in the cloud.