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Windows Azure is a platform that has you covered, whether you need to write software, run software that is already written, or Install and use “canned” software whether you or someone else wrote it. Like any platform, it’s a set of tools you can use where it makes sense to solve a problem...

(As with all of these types of posts, check the date of the latest update I’ve made here. Anything older than 6 months is probably out of date, given the speed with which we release new features into Windows and SQL Azure) I don’t normally like to discuss things in terms of tools. I find...

Windows Azure Storage has three primary components - a Queue, a Binary Large Object (BLOB) store (two types of these), and Table Storage. Storage of data on-premises is fairly well understood - but there components of it that you may not consider. When you move to a distributed architecture, certain...

One of the advantages of using Windows Azure to run your code is that you don’t have to constantly manage upgrades on your platform. While that’s a big advantage indeed, it immediately brings up the question - how do the upgrades happen? Microsoft upgrades the Azure platform in periodic increments, and...

Last week Microsoft announced several new offerings for “Big Data” - and since I’m a stickler for definitions, I wanted to make sure I understood what that really means. What is “Big Data”? What size hard drive is that? After all, my laptop has 1TB of storage - is my laptop “Big Data”? There are actually...

The Windows Azure Queue component, like all Windows Azure components (Roles, Storage, App Fabric, SQL Azure) can be used by itself or with other Windows Azure components. That’s why I refer to Windows Azure as “Distributed Computing” rather than “cloud”. Having a distributed off premise queue has a lot...

When you declare and use storage in Windows Azure - specifically in a BLOB object - it’s just a grouping of storage. There are two types of BLOBs - Page and Block. To use storage, you need a storage account, which hold Containers, and then you put a BLOB object in the Container. You address that...

This is one in a series of posts on a Windows Azure Learning Plan. You can find the main post here . This one deals with Storage for Windows Azure. Overview Overview and general information about Windows Azure Storage - what it is, how it works, and where you can learn more...

In a previous post I explained an overview of the storage options you have for Windows Azure . I’d like to pull back a bit today – because Windows Azure is often used as a single term, you might not be aware it actually is composed of three components. These components work together, but...

Most applications have four parts – input, computation, storage and output. I’ll write about all of these over time, but today I want to focus on how to choose the storage part of the equation. This won’t be a full tutorial, full of detail and all that, but I will put forth some “rules...