• The Windows Azure Platform is a Microsoft cloud platform
• Windows Azure and SQL Azure enable ISVs to build, host and scale applications.
• Microsoft provides development and infrastructure tools for the developers.

• Windows Azure became commercially available on 1 Feb 2010.
• Azure require no up-front expenses, no long term commitment, and enable you to pay only for the resources you use.

• Azure platform uses a specialized operating system, called Windows Azure
• The form an operating point of view is Windows Server 2008 and a customized version of Hyper-V (Windows Azure Hypervisor to provide virtualisation)are the fundamental of the services.

Windows Azure has three core components:

As the names suggest, Compute provides a computation environment with

• Web Role
• and Worker Role

Storage focuses on providing scalable storage (Blobs, Tables, Queue, Drives) for large-scale needs.

• Windows Azure Fabric makes up the physical underpinnings of the Windows Azure platform as the network of interconnected nodes consisting of servers, high-speed connections, and switches.

• Compute and Storage components are part of the Fabric.

• Fabric resources and applications and services running on those resources are managed by the Windows Azure Fabric Controller service.
  • It acts as the kernel of the Windows Azure distributed cloud operating system, providing scheduling, resource allocation, device management, and fault tolerance for the nodes in the Fabric.
  • It also provides high-level application models for intelligently managing the complete application lifecycle, including deployment, health monitoring, upgrades, and de-activation.

Sources

• The official website: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Azure

ABBYY offers all the different OCR SDKs for the Windows operating system.

• Starting with FineReader Engine 10 Release 3 (07/2011) the SDK
  • can be installed on Microsoft Azure
  • the licensing subsystem is also able to detect Azure

• Starting with FlexiCapture Engine 9.0 Release 3 (11/2011) Azure is also supported

• Licensing for the Cloud
  • Per default Azure support is not part of the default feature set of the development and runtime licences
  • If you plan to test/port your application to Azure, please contact ABBYY Europe to receive a test license key.
  • ABBYY knows that the default licensing scheme that works on single machines or LANs can not be applied 1:1 to Cloud installations
  • Please share your future business model plans with ABBYY – we will see how we can work together in this new area.
  • Read more: OCR Licensing for the Cloud

• Since February 2012 ABBYY started with a new Service on Microsoft Azure: ABBYY Cloud OCR SDK
• ABBYY Cloud OCR SDK is a OCR service with API, so that developers can easily integrate OCR and document conversion in their applications and services.
• Status: Released July 2012 - Read more...
  
  
  Back to:** ABBYY SDKs by Operating Systems