How do the Windows Azure features compare to Amazon Web Services?
While Windows Azure is a cloud service that uses (and charges via) computation resources that are analogous to physical computers, it differs in important ways from platforms such as AWS that offer VMs on demand. With a purely VM-based platform, the situation is much like hosting: You bear full responsibility for configuring and managing the VMs and the software they contain. With Windows Azure, you only need to supply the application, along with instructions about how many instances to run. The platform itself takes care of everything else, including updating system software when required. The Windows Azure platform also offers functionality to make it easy to connect applications and databases hosted in the cloud with other hosted and on-premises software assets. This functionality is provided by the Service Bus and Access Control. While other offerings such as AWS provide features primarily intended to connect one EC2 instances with another EC2 instance, Service Bus and Access Contr
