Question

I want start developing with Azure platform. My question is: is there any chance to run azure environment on Windows Server? I don’t want to test in Visual Studio, but on separate environment.
What software I need to emulate Azure environment?

Answer 1

The best you can do is to run the Azure Emulator that you’re currently running on your desktop on the server, but that really won’t achieve anything meaningful.

Windows Azure is not a set of features that can be installed on top of an OS. It’s a complete data centre environment comprising bespoke hardware, customised OS, network systems, storage, SQL Azure, AppFabric and a whole host of other things.

If you have many millions of dollars to invest, Microsoft can build you a Windows Azure capability. We have one in Japan. One day, hopefully in the not too distant future, you’ll be able to buy a much smaller one, but it’s still likely to cost millions (if you’re lucky, only a few $100k).

Practically speaking, it’s much more cost effective to test your Azure applications on the public Azure platform.

From a practical perspective, you can architect your application to abstract out any direct dependencies on Azure into independent classes that can be substituted using Dependency Injection. By implementing versions of these classes that are designed to run in a standard Windows environment, you can test the vast majority of your application in your environment before deploying to Azure. Use SQL Server as a local equivalent to SQL Azure. Azure storage replacements may take some more thought and if you use features such as Service Bus or ACS, you’ve got yet more work to do.

But be sure to run a comprehensive test phase with your application running on Azure before you roll it into production.