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Microsoft makes Windows Azure services generally available

Microsoft is moving more of its Windows Azure products from preview to general availability. The latest: Azure Mobile Services and Azure Web Sites.

Mary Jo Foley
Mary Jo Foley has covered the tech industry for 30 years for a variety of publications, including ZDNet, eWeek and Baseline. She is the author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft plans to stay relevant in the post-Gates era (John Wiley & Sons, 2008). She also is the cohost of the "Windows Weekly" podcast on the TWiT network.
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Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is continuing to move more of its "preview" versions of its Windows Azure services to "general availability." The latest two to get the GA nod are Azure Mobile Services and Azure Web Sites.

Microsoft used its Day 2 keynote Thursday at the Microsoft Build 2013 developer conference to make the announcements.

Windows Azure Mobile services allow developers building Windows, Windows Phone, iOS and Android apps to store data in the Azure cloud, authenticate users, and send push notifications. Microsoft announced Azure Mobile Services preview in August 2012 and added Android support a few months ago.

Since announcing the preview, there have been 20,000 apps written using Azure Mobile Services, according to Microsoft officials.

Microsoft also announced general availability of Windows Azure Web Sites during the Build 2013 keynote on Thursday.

Windows Azure Web Sites allows developers to provision Web applications and sites on Windows Azure. Developers can do this via the Azure Management Portal, their integrated development environment of choice, from scripts using PowerShell or CLI tools running on any operating system. Users can scale up and out thanks to Azure.

Microsoft made the initial Azure Web Sites preview available in June 2012.

This story originally appeared as "Microsoft makes Azure Mobile Services, Web Sites generally available" on ZDNet.