Official definition goes “Windows Azure™ is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment  for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft® datacenters.”

Basically, it is a set of platform, tools and infrastructure that helps you create and deploy applications that run in the cloud.

Some useful resources:

  1. Windows Azure Pricing vs Amazon AWS Pricing Comparison
  2. Windows Azure: getting started
  3. Serving Your Website From a Windows Azure Drive