Certificate Management
Learn how to add a certificate authority (CA) certificate to the Java CA certificate (cacerts) store. The article provides specific examples for the CA certificate required by the Twilio service and the CA certificate for the Windows Azure Service Bus.
Caching and CDN
The Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) offers a global solution for delivering high-bandwidth content by caching blobs and static content at physical nodes around the world. This articlea describes how to enable CDN and add, access, and delete content.
Email and Voice
Windows Azure applications can use SendGrid to include email functionality. SendGrid provides reliable email delivery, real-time analytics, and flexible APIs that allow users to easily incorporate the service into their Windows Azure applications.
This tutorial shows how you can use SendGrid to send emails from a web page hosted in Windows Azure.
Windows Azure applications can use Twilio to incorporate phone call and Short Message Service (SMS) message functionality. Use the Twilio APIs to make and receive phone calls, make and receive SMS messages, and enable voice communication using existing internet connections, including mobile connections.
Identity
Access Control is a Windows Azure service that provides an easy way of authenticating users who need to access your web applications and services, without having to factor complex authentication logic into your code. It provides integration with Windows Identity Foundation (WIF), support for popular web identity providers including Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, and support for ADFS 2.0.
The Access Control Service returns Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) to your application when the user successfully logs on.
You can use web single sign-on (also called identity federation) to provide single sign-on access through a federated mechanism that relies on a Security Token Service (STS). This guide shows you how to accomplish this using the STS in your Office 365 tenant provided by Windows Azure Active Directory.
Image Processing
Blitline is a cloud-based image processing service. This guide describes how to access Blitline services and how to submit jobs to Blitline.
Messaging and Integration
Service Bus Queues offer simple first in, first out guaranteed message delivery and support a range of standard protocols (REST, AMQP, WS*) and APIs to put and pull messages on and off a queue.
Service Bus Topics provide a publish/subscribe messaging model to support one-to-many communication. You can optionally register filter rules for a topic on a per-subscription basis, which allows you to restrict which messages to a topic are received by which topic subscriptions.
Windows Azure Queues store large numbers of messages that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS. Common uses of Queue storage include creating a backlog of work to process asynchronously, and passing messages from a Windows Azure Web role to a Windows Azure Worker role.
The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) 1.0 is an efficient, reliable, wire-level messaging protocol that can be used to build robust, cross-platform, messaging applications. This article provides an overview of AMQP 1.0 support in Service Bus that allows you to build cross-platform, hybrid applications using an open standard protocol.
This How-To Guide explains how to use the Service Bus brokered messaging features (queues and publish/subscribe topics) from AMQP 1.0 using the .NET API.