Cloud and ConnectivityCustomers need the flexibility to run their applications and services on a variety of platforms: on-premises, in the cloud, and everywhere in between. In heterogeneous environments, customers need the following to be successful:

they need to connect and •compose applications,they need to do it easily through •consumable web services,they need an easy way to •authorize access to those services using existing digital identities, they need to maintain •interoperability across platforms, protocols, and standards.

As part of the Windows Azure platform AppFabric, we have made Service Bus and Access Control available to fulfill these three customer needs. They are designed to securely connect applications of any kind—across the cloud and from cloud to on-premises.

Build new applications or extend your existing applications into the cloud using familiar technology and tools in new ways to achieve web-capable scalability. Focus on building solutions—let the Windows® Azure™ platform manage the infrastructure.

Flexible, Internet-scale Services AppFabric’s Service Bus and Access Control are services that make it easy to realize many of the benefits offered by cloud-based software. These services are particularly useful for connectivity and integration scenarios—by using these services, you can develop distributed cloud-based applications without needing to build and manage all of the associated infrastructure. It enables you to make your applications more scalable and flexible, resulting in more rapid deployments and extended reach, while keeping your local computing assets intact.

Standards-based & InteroperableWhile you will appreciate the similarity and completeness of these hosted services with the Microsoft platform and Microsoft tools, they also fully support industry standards and Web protocols such as representational state transfer (REST), SOAP, and HTTP. As a result, Service Bus and Access Control can be used by both .NET and other platforms.

Extend Existing InvestmentsAlthough cloud services are a relatively new area for most developers, you can leverage your existing .NET skills. Service Bus and Access Control in Windows Azure platform AppFabric are well suited for developers with .NET and Visual Studio® development experience. It does not require developers to learn a new set of tools. Common configuration and management tasks can be performed through a simple Web user interface, and advanced programmatic access is available though the software development kit (SDK).

AppFabric Access ControlAccess Control takes the pain out of controlling access to your Web applications and services. A simple and familiar programming model keeps your code clean and lets you move a lot of the difficult to implement functionality to a declarative model of rules and claims. These rules can be easily configured to cover your current and future access control needs.

Service Bus and Access Control in Windows Azure platform AppFabric

AppFabric Access Control (continued)Want to offer web services to a corporation as a hosted/cloud-based solution, but the customer is reluctant to create and manage a separate identity system just to work with you? With Access Control, you can easily federate with your customer’s existing identity management infrastructure, be it Active Directory® or any other standards-based infrastructure. Your customer does not need to create and manage parallel user accounts and will be much more receptive to a hosted/cloud-based solution. With Access Control, you can also expose the same web services to multiple customers using a common set of rules and claims, which can make your services even more valuable.

Need to integrate your application with a new identity system you have never heard of? Using Access Control, you can easily extend it to bring the new identity system into your world with minimal changes to your application.

The service is based on a claims- based authorization model, which alleviates the need to develop to and continually support a variety of identity providers and their architecture.

In addition, the service’s federation capabilities allow use of Active Directory Federation Server, Windows Identity Foundation, etc.

AppFabric Service BusService Bus alleviates the pain that you have when you try to expose your application or service’s functionality across a variety of network-related constraints, for example when it is located behind a firewall, subject to network address translation (NAT), and/or bound to frequently changing, dynamically assigned IP addresses.

Once Service Bus has helped establish connectivity between applications, it also gives you the flexibility to choose how they communicate with each other. Eventing, service remoting, and protocol tunneling scenarios are all

For more information, visit: www.windowsazure.com msdn.microsoft.com/azure

Download the SDK for Windows Azure platform AppFabric at:www.windowsazure.com

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Resources and Links

enabled, and developers can use Service Bus to build relayed, buffered, bidirectional, publish-subscribe, multicast, streaming, direct-connect, and other communication patterns into their solutions.

Service Bus lets you create a global hierarchical namespace that, subject to configurable privacy constraints, is publically discoverable and addressable. This means that your service can get a stable Internet- accessible Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that can be accessed by any authorized client application, irrespective of the client’s location.

Additionally, depending on your security needs, Service Bus can also be secured by Access Control. This can automate authorization rules enforcement and dramatically simplify access and control management of your service, while allowing your customers and partners to access Service Bus using their existing identity systems.

ON-PREMISES APPLICATIONSFIREWALL

WEB SERVICES & APPLICATIONS

SERVICE BUSACCESS CONTROL

AppFabric’s Service Bus and Access Control enhance connectivity and security in the Windows Azure Platform.