Windows Azure Platform is the cloud offering from Microsoft that encompasses many independent services for compute, storage, networking, monitoring and reporting among others. IT professionals ...

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that ...

Microsoft launched its cloud platform, Azure, in 2010. Since the launch, the service has posted triple digit growth, and last year generated over $1 billion in revenue, according to reports.

Welcome to the first of a two-part series. In this first part, I'll talk about the physical infrastructure that Microsoft uses to ensure availability and provide a high degree of uptime for the Azure ...