Windows azure appfabric (1) platform Introduction

Windows azure appfabric is the third windows azure platform service. It is actually a middleware product on the cloud. It provides two major services:

Service Bus)

The service bus can be used to expose local services to the Internet. Most enterprises have their own local networks. In order to solve the problem of insufficient IP addresses, Nat is usually configured, so each server does not have a definite address. For security reasons, firewalls usually limit most ports. This makes it quite difficult to access locally deployed services on the Internet.
 
Service Bus is designed to solve this problem. As a man-in-the-middle, your services and clients communicate with each other as service bus clients. Because the service bus does not have a NAT problem, your service and client can easily communicate with it. In the most extreme scenarios, the service bus only requires your server to expose port 80 or port 443 of the outgoing bound. In other words, your server can access the Internet through HTTP (s) protocol. In this way, your service can be connected to the service bus. Therefore, it has low requirements on the firewall.

 

Access Control

Security is alwaysProgramThe first factor to consider is that permission management in the cloud is often more difficult than within the enterprise. This is because you cannot directly use products such as the Active Directory to manage the access control of your programs in a unified manner. Access control is generated to solve this problem.
 
Access Control supports federated authentication and authorization. For example, you can ask your users to perform authentication through the enterprise's Active Directory Federation server (ADFs), log on using their domain account, and pass the authenticated claim to access control, then, you can grant or deny access to your services and resources based on the rules set in the access control area. Of course, access control also supports various other authentication methods. With support for standard protocols such as wrap and SAML, access control shows a good cross-platform model.
 
Others
 
In the future, we may also port the features of today's Windows Server appfabric to Windows azure platform appfabric. The distributed cache in Windows Server appfabric and the WCF/WF management function bring various benefits to developers and administrators.

 

Note that Microsoft launched another server-oriented product Windows Server appfabric shortly after Windows azure appfabric was released. The two product names are very similar, with the following differences:

		Windows azure appfabric	Windows Server appfabric
Running Environment		Windows azure Platform	Windows Server
Installation Method		No installation required	Software Package Installation
Use Cases		All applications deployed in Windows azure, And applications that can access the Windows azure Platform	Internal Enterprise Applications
Billing Method		On-demand service	Free
Function	Access Control	Yes	None
	Service Bus	Yes	None
	Cache	Yes	Yes
	Service Management	Yes (CTP)	Yes

 

 

Reference: Windows azure Chinese Blog

http://blogs.msdn.com/ B /azchina/archive/2010/02/05/windows-azure-appfabric.aspx