The Microsoft Azure Cloud is looking pretty solid compared to just a few months ago.  The storage mechanisms in the cloud now are blobs, drives, tables, and queues.  Also, not to forget, is SQL Azure.  I won’t dive too much into that, as most will know what SQL Server is, and SQL Azure is pretty much just a hosted SQL Server instance.

The blobs are generally geared toward holding binary type data, images and those types of things.  The tables are huge key value type stores.  The drives are VHD, which are virtual hard drives.  The queues are just queues used for workflow and also to store messages back and forth in a queue.

These methods are accessible via REST, which makes application development against the storage services extremely easy.  This is a big plus point as REST services are a preferred way to connect and interact with data storage.  It also sets up Silverlight as a prime framework to utilize services.

Day 4 I pretty much dedicated to reviewing these cloud services and finishing up work related development.  With that, I'm wrapping up my MIX 2010 blog coverage.  Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Original entry.