Utilizing Windows Azure to Support Geo-science Applications

Windows Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure, created by Microsoft for developing, deploying and managing applications through global networks. It provides Platform as a service (PaaS) which have been widely used in different domains to support scientific studies. This paper experiences the feasibility of utilizing Windows Azure to support different type of geo-science applications. Specially, the load balancing feature of Azure is used to address intensive concurrent access for geo-science data; cloud-based database is utilized for support Big Spatial data management; and the global deployment feature is used to improve the evaluation accuracy for geo-science services.