When you think about the cloud and SharePoint, a number of things may come to mind. For example, SharePoint Online—Microsoft’s hosted cloud offering for SharePoint. This is a cost-efficient alternative for organizations that don’t want to run and manage their own instance of SharePoint on-premises. Perhaps Web 2.0 might come to mind. SharePoint is a platform, and there is a growing amount of web-based services and applications, social or otherwise, that can be integrated with SharePoint in different ways. A third thing that might come to mind is tying Azure services and applications into SharePoint. Although each of these integrations of cloud and SharePoint are interesting, the focus of this article is on the latter integration: Azure and SharePoint.
Windows Azure is Microsoft’s OS in the cloud, and it provides reach, scalability, and reusability for both hardware and software. There are several Azure offerings: Windows Azure (core management and storage features), SQL Azure (data management), and Azure AppFabric (helps developers connect services and applications in the cloud). Azure provides a set of tools and SDK for your cloud-based development, plus it enables you to develop and deploy solutions into the cloud. This, in essence, makes the web your potential audience and allows you to scale resource usage in a more optimized way. You pay for what you use as opposed to having servers sitting on racks running at less-than-full capacity.
For SharePoint, Azure represents a significant opportunity to integrate cloud-based innovation into both your on-premises and hosted instances of SharePoint 2010. But to be clear, at present we’re talking about integration at the consumptive level and not integration at the foundational level. Put another way, you aren’t hosting SharePoint on Azure; rather, you’re integrating Azure applications and services with SharePoint. However, this integrated marriage can be very powerful, enabling you to launch rich, cloud-based services across multiple SharePoint instances (and indeed versions). Azure is the future of cloud computing for Microsoft, and with SharePoint as a leading web-based collaborative platform, the opportunity is ripe for building compelling significant bridges across these two technologies.
Points of Convergence
There are a number of different ways to integrate SharePoint and Azure, which cut across shallow integrations (such as using IFRAME to integrate ASP.NET applications hosted in Azure) to more service-centric integrations (such as creating and deploying a custom service to Azure and then integrating with a SharePoint list or Web Part). What is good about this spectrum is that as a developer, you can choose to build and deploy packaged SharePoint solutions (e.g., WSPs that have a ready-made Azure integration) or create the service and guidance on how to consume the service.
Approaching this from a SharePoint perspective, the table in Figure 1 provides a summary of some of the more common places where you can integrate Azure with SharePoint 2010. There are a number of different ways to integrate with SharePoint (and indeed Office as well). To illustrate how you can accomplish this integration, I’ll show you a simple example.