As you know, we’ve been talking about Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for the entire month.

“Really?  I thought you were talking about Windows Azure and virtual machines.”

Yes, that’s true.  And these virtual machines can be the foundation of or an extension of a Private Cloud outside of the walls of your own datacenter.  Microsoft is providing an infrastructure on which to do this extension.  And this is new.  Windows Azure originally started as a “Platform-as-a-Service” solution, whereby companies could build and test applications locally, package them up, and then place them on a platform without concern or consideration for the details of the platform itself.  Sure, foundationally it is virtualization and instances that can scale up and scale out (and back) as needed, but you didn’t have to build or manage the virtual machines themselves.  Yet, as I’m sure you know, there are still reasons why sometimes building and maintaining the OS as a foundation for other non-PaaS-friendly applications is still beneficial. 

“Okay.  But what if I have an application or solution that I’d like to use PaaS application components, but maybe I want to have it connect to my own SQL Server?”

If you want to run the SQL Server locally, but connected to-and-from Windows Azure applications, you can use Windows Azure Connect.  Or you can securely connect your entire local network to an Windows Azure network using a Windows Azure Virtual Network.

“That’s cool, but what if I now want to move that SQL Server into the cloud as a virtual machine running in Windows Azure?”

Bingo.  That’s the topic for today’s part 24 in our “31 Days of Servers in the Cloud” series.  Harold Wong, my Arizonian (is that correct?**) friend and coworker, writes about how to connect PaaS applications to IaaS (virtual machine) applications. 

READ HIS ARTICLE HERE

**Arizonite?  Arizonaminian?  Arizonaphobea? …  He’s from Phoenix, so.. does that make him a Phonecian Arizonian?

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