The Azure is the Windows operative system designed for “Cloud”.  It is a scalable platform
which provide support for: Live Services, .NET services, SQL Services, SharePoint Services and  Dynamics CRM Services.

If provides a life cycle management of services and applications in the cloud. It is important that Azure does not only manage server. Moreover it also manages services.

Read the complete post at http://developers.de/blogs/damir_dobric/archive/2008/10/27/windows-azure.aspx