Saas (Software as a Service) is becoming incredibly prominent in our minds when it comes to the development of new applications, it’s also changing the way we sell these applications to consumers. Looking as an SaaS application we can determine that it lives solely in the cloud, so it would make sense to have potential customers troubleshoot solutions online. People should never look towards a cloud server for any commercial regulated datasets, but why is the case? There are plenty of them, but the main ones being the Windows Azure Marketplace and the Windows Azure Store.
The main difference between the two applications is that the Marketplace is actually located outside of the Windows Azure Management Portal. With that being said, the Windows Azure Store can still be accessed from the portal for those who really need it. Using these, you can find the Windows Azure applications you may need in order to better your application or web site, then they can proceed to register them through either the application itself or directly through the Marketplace (or even the Windows Azure Store).
Customers whom are making use of these two resources will find themselves in a great position; they can look at any commercially available datasets they might be interested in, as well as any demographical or financial data that could pertain to their application. Whenever a user finds something that they absolutely love, they’ll be able to purchase and access it through the personal vendor of the application or directly through the Marketplace. To put icing on the cake, these applications can use the Bing Search API within the Marketplace, which means they’ll be able to see web results as well. This better for anybody who wants to have a broader range of search results, because it may not always be as straight-forward as you thought it would be.
The whole purpose of this is to make the implementation of any applications you fancy as easy as it could possibly be, this means that a lot more people may experiment and find the perfect fit for the application they find themselves developing. SDK’s are something else you should keep in mind too, as they make the implementation of applications of different coding languages much easier. Microsoft has specific SDK’s available on the market for every single coding language, so there’s nothing you can’t do with the use of SDK’s.
The whole point of an SDK is to help you manage your Windows Azure Applications, as well as build and deploy them as you please. They also provide you with client libraries that will allow you to create software outside of the cloud more efficiently (if it’s using Windows Azure Services that is). For a simple example, we’ll say that you’re running a host that is relying on the blobs, or even that you’ve created a tool that deploys the applications themselves.
