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 data centers.
Azure Services Platform is an application platform in the cloud that allows applications to be hosted and run at Microsoft datacenters. It provides a cloud operating system called Windows Azure that serves as a runtime for the applications and provides a set of services that allows development, management and hosting of managed applications off-premises.All Azure Services and applications built using them run on top of Windows Azure.
Windows Azure can rather be said a version of Windows that runs over the Internet from inside Microsoft’s own data centers.