Development tools, including Compute and Storage emulators and a packer, require Windows.
For the applications themselves, this requirement is compatible with Windows Server 2008 R2. Thus, for example, you can develop an application on Linux or OS X without using the Azure SDK or tools and prepare a virtual Windows Server image with a Java application server and a pre-deployed and pre-configured application, and deploy this image as a virtual machine role . An application can access Windows Azure services through HTTP or using the Java libraries included as source code in the SDK .
This approach is better for migrating existing applications. To develop new tools, the tools available on Windows will improve performance.
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