The benefit of Azure is that it can be used in Microsoft data centers around the world. The purpose of Azure is to have a Software Development Kit for websites, virtual machines, and cloud services for either the cloud, on-premise, or a hybrid between the two. Some cloud technologies, such as Salesforce, are cloud-centric and not on-premise-centric. The Windows Azure SDK is considered open source from Microsoft, yes, open source, and it can be found at https://github.com/Azure. There are Power Shell tools for Windows to deploy (see https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-tools) and even command-line tools for the Linux and Mac operating systems (see http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/azure/windows-azure-for-linux-and-mac-users.pdf and http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/command-line-tools/).

Just as in Salesforce and other cloud technologies, there are galleries with pre-created applications and modules (see http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/gallery...