Painless Hosting with Azure

In this chapter we will show you how to host a simple application that displays a Bing Map on Microsoft Azure (formerly Windows Azure), Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform. Cloud computing provides agile IT for businesses and developers. If a business wanted to deploy a new web application, the traditional method of deployment would require that the business set up the necessary hardware, software, operations, and support team in order to host this application on premises. With cloud computing, all of the infrastructure needed to deploy that application would already be available on the cloud, thereby reducing the necessary setup time and money required to deploy.