Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure, created by Microsoft, for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed and Microsoft partner hosted datacenters. It provides both PaaS and IaaS services and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems. Azure was announced in October 2008 and released on 1 February 2010 as Windows Azure, before being renamed to Microsoft Azure on 25 March 2014. In the most recent Gartner “Magic Quadrant” rating of cloud IaaS providers, Azure was one of only two vendors (along with Amazon Web Services) to place in the “Leaders” category.