AppFabric Access Control

The Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control (AC) service is a hosted service that provides federated authentication and rules-driven, claims-based authorization for REST Web services. REST Web services can rely on AC for simple username/password scenarios, in addition to enterprise integration scenarios that use Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) v2.

AppFabric Service Bus

The Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus provides a hosted, secure, and widely available infrastructure for widespread communication, large-scale event distribution, naming, and service publishing. AppFabric Service Bus provides connectivity options for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and other service endpoints – including REST endpoints -- that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to reach. Endpoints can be located behind network address translation (NAT) boundaries, or bound to frequently-changing, dynamically-assigned IP addresses, or both.

The Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus and Access Control Overview

The AppFabric Service Bus connects local, firewalled applications and data with applications in the cloud, rich desktop applications, and smart, Web-enabled devices anywhere in the world.

AppFabric Access Control is a claims-based access control service that can be used on most Web-enabled devices to build interoperable, federated authentication and authorization into any connected application.

Service Bus Features

• Securely exposes to external callers Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)-based Web services that are running behind firewalls and NAT routers -- without requiring you to open any inbound ports or otherwise change firewall and router configurations.
  
• Enables secure inbound communication from devices outside the firewall.
  
• Provides a global namespace system that is location-independent: the name of a service in the AppFabric Service Bus provides no information about the final destination of the communication.
  
• Provides a service registry for publishing and discovering service endpoint references in a service namespace.
  
• Builds and hosts service endpoints that support:
  
  
  • Exposing a Web service to remote users. Expose and secure a local Web service in the cloud without managing any firewall or NAT settings.
    
  • Eventing behavior. Listen for notifications on any device, anywhere in the world.
    
  • Tunneling between any two endpoints to enable bidirectional streams.
    

The following diagram illustrates the capabilities of the Service Bus.

Access Control Features

The AppFabric Access Control service provides claims-based authentication and authorization for REST Web services.

• Usable from any platform.
  
• Low friction way to onboard new clients.
  
• Integrates with AD FS v2.
  
• Implements OAuth Web Resource Authorization Protocol (WRAP)and Simple Web Tokens (SWT).
  
• Enables simple delegation.
  
• Trusted as an identity provider by the AppFabric Service Bus.
  
• Extensible to provide integration with any identity provider.

Windows Azure AppFabric

          

         Windows Azure AppFabric provides a comprehensive cloud middleware platform for developing, deploying and managing applications on the Windows Azure Platform.


          The Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus and Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control together make hybrid, connected applications—applications that communicate from behind firewalls, across the Internet, from hosted cloud servers, between rich desktops and smart devices—easier to build, secure, and manage. Although you can build hybrid, connected applications today, doing this often means you have to build important infrastructure components before you can build the applications themselves. AppFabric Service Bus and AppFabric Access Control provide several important infrastructure elements so that you can more easily begin making your connected applications work now.

• The AppFabric Service Bus securely relays messages to and from any Web service regardless of the device or computer on which they are hosted, or whether that device is behind a firewall or NAT router.
  
• The AppFabric Access Control is an interoperable, claims-based service that provides federated authentication and authorization solutions for any resource, whether in the cloud, behind a firewall, or on a smart device. 

Competitors of The Windows Azure Platform

• Amazon Web Services
• Engine Yard
• Google App Engine
• Heroku
• Force.com

Implementation of Windows Azure Platform

The Windows Azure platform uses a specialized operating system, called Windows Azure, to run its "fabric layer" — a cluster hosted at Microsoft's datacenters that manages computing and storage resources of the computers and provisions the resources (or a subset of them) to applications running on top of Windows Azure. Windows Azure has been described as a "cloud layer" on top of a number of Windows Server systems, which use Windows Server 2008 and a customized version of Hyper-V, known as the Windows Azure Hypervisor to provide virtualization of services.

The platform includes five services — Live Services, SQL Azure (formerly SQL Services), AppFabric (formerly .NET Services), SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services — which the developers can use to build the applications that will run in the cloud. A client library, in managed code, and associated tools are also provided for developing cloud applications in Visual Studio. Scaling and reliability are controlled by the Windows Azure Fabric Controller so the services and environment don't crash if one of the servers crashes within the Microsoft datacenter and provides the management of the user's web application like memory resources and load balancing.

The Azure Services Platform can currently run .NET Framework applications compiled for the CLR, while supporting the ASP.NET application framework and associated deployment methods to deploy the applications onto the cloud platform. It can also support PHP websites. Two SDKs have been made available for interoperability with the Azure Services Platform: The Java SDK for AppFabric and the Ruby SDK for AppFabric. These enable Java and Ruby developers to integrate with AppFabric Internet services.

Overview for the Windows Azure Platform

            

Azure Services Platform is an application platform in the cloud that allows applications to be hosted and run at Microsoft datacenters. It provides a cloud operating system called Windows Azure that serves as a runtime for the applications and provides a set of services that allows development, management and hosting of applications off-premises. All Azure Services and applications built using them run on top of Windows Azure.

Windows Azure has three core components: Compute, Storage and Fabric. As the names suggest, Compute provides computation environment with Web Role and Worker Role while Storage focuses on providing scalable storage (Blobs, Tables, Queue, Drives) for large scale needs.

Fabric (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. Conceptually, the repetitive pattern of nodes and connections suggests a woven or fabric-like nature. 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.

Azure Services Platform provides an API built on REST, HTTP and XML that allows a developer to interact with the services provided by Windows Azure. A client-side managed class library is also provided that encapsulates the functions of interacting with the services. It also integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio so that it can be used as the IDE to develop and publish Azure-hosted applications. Windows Azure is commercially available as of 1st Feb 2010. Users can purchase Windows Azure service time from the http://www.microsoft.com/azurewebsite.

Azure also offers Content Delivery (CDN) services as an option. Currently in no-cost "Community Technology Preview" the Azure CDN enables worldwide low-latency delivery of static content from Azure Storage to end users from 18 data centers worldwide.