Sitecore Azure Takes Advantage of Windows Azure Services

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I recently blogged on interesting avenues in which you can use Windows Azure to more easily move software that was originally on-premise to the cloud.  No sooner do I finish that than I read an article from @sharepointrich on SharePoint vs Sitecore.  In his post, Rich mentioned that Sitecore Azure runs on Windows Azure.  That picked my interest because it’s the perfect use case of a software vendor moving to Azure as a cloud platform because of the value inherent in Windows Azure with:

1. SQL Server Database services (key to Sitecore Azure)
2. IIS
3. Active Directory Services

One of the first things you find out either in their main marketing page or in an earlier blog post about it is that they rely heavily on the SQL Server Database services and that makes a lot of sense. (warning, outdated content in the blog post, Sitecore now supports DMS in Azure). The next thing you understand is that they intend to take full advantage of the scalability, availability, and global reach of the Azure data centers.
Even more interesting is the fact that Jakob Leander notes in his blog post that you can do a hybrid model where Sitecore is installed on-premise and the database and other services reside in the cloud. His post was from January and some things have changed since then, mainly that Azure supports both IaaS and PaaS so now you can have a hybrid approach or a fully hosted on Azure approach.  Here’s a video giving a high level overview of how it.